Science tells us that matter/energy may be pixels of information

reply to post by sirnex


I see you're back invading threads with your mindless dribble.

You don't subscribe to Quantum mechanics, Einstein, Information theory, theoretical physics and more so you're living in a fantasy world.

Again, this is a dimwitted view of the Observer. The Observer's power is not in observation but choice. The Observer's choice causes a measurement to occur.

This has been confirmed in several experiments.

The double slit experiment
en.wikipedia.org...

The delayed "choice" experiment
en.wikipedia.org...

Quantum eraser delayed choice experiment
en.wikipedia.org...

Again, a dimwitted view of the Observer thinks the observer is simply looking at something. No, the Observer is making a choice to gather information. This causes a measurement to occur. The Observer's choice can even determine which measurement will occur.

[edit on 17-6-2010 by Matrix Rising]

Thinking about temporal inconsistency,

does that imply that time is distributed throughout the Universe system?
Which would give it a general consistency [at least at luminally insignificant speeds].

If time is distributed, i am pretty sure that would make the manipulation of it much more difficult.

Distributed time would be more flexible, locally variant, which might actually fit with relativistic effects near luminality.

But that also might mean one could manipulate time locally, without having to address/worry-about some big macro-structure overhead.
It really does open up the idea along the lines of the Dorian Grey painting [device].

Again, the choice of the Observer is very powerful and this is why Deutsch and others look to Many Worlds. They want to take away the choice of the Observer because they realize if the Observer is making a choice then the Observer is creating reality.

So thet say the Observer isn't making a choice but the Parallel universes is making the choice.

So when you look at Schrodinger's cat it's random decoherence that causes the cat to either be dead or alive but decoherence isn't tied to the choice of the observer.

Many worlds says in universe A there will be a dead cat and in universe B there will be a live cat. This is just random decoherence , so there could be live cats in both universes. In universe A the Observer opens the box with a cup of coffee in his hand and in universe B the Observer opens the box with a cup of tea in his hand.

So it's the Observers choice that creates reality not decoherence. The Observer had to make the choice to set up the experiment.

I know why materialist like many worlds but again, decoherence has nothing to do with the choice of the Observer.

This ties into the Holographic Principle because the Holographic Principle tells us that things like intelligence and consciousness have to be embedded into the fabric of reality.

reply to post by Matrix Rising


Ok, I may be dense, but explain to me why choice has to be happening?

Why could this not be a deterministic universe a la Spinoza?

reply to post by Matrix Rising


Christ, your the one talking about fantasies. The holographic principle solely rests upon black hole thermodynamics.

Guess what genius... the two people we attribute to discovering black holes both did not believe they existed, and Schwarschild even went so far as to write a paper refuting the damn thing's. Black hole thermodynamics is a mathematical fantasy with no basis in reality and subsequently all derived works based on such fantasies are further deluded fantasies. People who adhere to such fantasies are raving lunatics with little or no education in history or reality.

Your also hung up on this idiotic idea that the human mind is capable to directly observing and effecting things. The observer effect says nothing of the sort and I've directly quoted exactly what the observer effect is talking about. You simply dismiss it so you can continue living in your deluded little fantasy world that you saw in the movie theater.

reply to post by Matrix Rising

You're not making any sense.

From this and your other posts, I notice that you have a strong preference for making definite and imperative statements, and you appear to have very little interest in what anyone else has to say, and are consequently not trying very hard to understand.

So I will not waste your or my time telling you what I think. Obviously you don't care.

The Observer's choice causes a measurement to occur.

The Observer's choice can even determine which measurement will occur.

Ok.

Let's assume this is true.

How does one choose?

reply to post by Illusionsaregrander


Choice has to be happening because this is what the physics and the experiments tell us. The thing that scares Physicist and especially materialist is that quantum mechanics actually tells us about the nature of reality. If the universe is based on probabilities and choice and there isn't theory of everything or a hidden variable to bring back a materialistic worldview, then some scientist and materialist will be sick. This is because quantum mechanics leads back to the Observer and choice.

What has happened in science is a strong strain of determinism occurred because of Newton. With Newton, scientist thought they had all of the answers and the universe was like a watch. All you needed to know were things like position and momentum of an object and viola, Newton provided all of the answers. Then Relativity and quantum mechanics came along and destroyed everything.

So many within scientific circles are determined to bring determinism back into the picture. They want the days of old, the days of Newton.

Einstein died looking for a theory of everything and he said,"God doesn't play dice."

This is what the delayed choice experiment showed:

According to the results of the double slit experiment, if experimenters do something to learn which slit the photon goes through, they change the outcome of the experiment and the behavior of the photon. If the experimenters know which slit it goes through, the photon will behave as a particle. If they do not know which slit it goes through, the photon will behave as if it were a wave when it is given an opportunity to interfere with itself. The double-slit experiment is meant to observe phenomena that indicate whether light has a particle nature or a wave nature. The fundamental lesson of Wheeler's delayed choice experiment is that the result depends on whether the experiment is set up to detect waves or particles.

en.wikipedia.org...

See things like string theory, the holographic principle, theoretical physics and more are trying to explain an observed phenomena. This is not the wishful thinking of physicist, this is reality.

Some try to get away from the choice of the Observer by saying that there's an infinite number of Parallel universes that's making the choice not the Observer. This is because they know if the Observer is making the choice then the Observer creates reality.

The problem here is decoherence doesn't say anything about the choice of the Observer. Decoherence tells us that after a choice is made it's thermodynamically irreversible and random measurements can occur in nature like when Schrodinger's cat interacts with it's enviroment, but it tells us nothing about the choice of the Observer.

Experiments tell us that the choice of the Observer can determine the outcome of an event and subatomic particles are waves of probabilities until the Observer makes the choice to gather information about things like position or momentum.

We are Infinite Being having finite experiences. This is what science tells us but scientist long for the days of Newton and they long for determinism in this dice game that we call life.

reply to post by Matrix Rising

Ah, another helping of fine tripe from one of ATS's leading purveyors.

Matter and energy are not information. They contain or produce information, and their interaction is most easily described in terms of information.

You may well be right that the material universe is some kind of projection, but there is no scientific proof that it is so, whatever you may have read in the New Age Garbage library. Believe whatever you want to believe by all means, but don't imagine for a moment that your beliefs are based on any kind of empirical evidence.

Again: matter and energy are not 'pixels of information'. They are real. Pixels of information can't burn you or drown you.

reply to post by Astyanax



More nonsense.

You said:

Matter and energy are not information. They contain or produce information, and their interaction is most easily described in terms of information.

First, matter and energy are not information. I can agree with that. They manifest information. They are like the pixels on the screen that's manifesting information that's written in the program that produced this website.

You said they contain information or they produce information. This is just trying to play both sides because you don't have a clue.

No, they don't produce information. That's just silly. That's like saying the pixels on the computer screen produced the program that designed the website. It's the same old materialist nonsense. It's like saying if you put a monkey in front of a typewriter they will eventually type Othello or Macbeth.

Materialism is nonsense.

You also said, pixels can't burn you or draw you, sure they can if you're a simulated being and information on a 2-D surface area is telling the matter and energy how to behave.

This isn't saying you're a simulated being in a computer, this is saying the the universe is a simulation or a hologram of information that's encoded on a 2-D surface area.

Again, matter and energy manifest this information just like the pixels on the screen manifest the information in the program that designed this website.

Before we go any further, I would like for you to show me the experiment that shows matter has an objective existence outside our perception of it. What scientific experiment shows that matter exists? At Planck scales matter and energy evolve into infinity and the laws of physics break down. So the smaller it gets, the more it starts to disappear into something we can't define. This is not the case with information.

It's funny how materialist talk about matter this or matter that but they can't even prove that matter exists. You can only say something we "perceive" and call matter manifests information but at Planck scales this matter goes poof.

Originally posted by Matrix Rising
First, matter and energy are not information. I can agree with that.

Right. You just contradicted your own thread title. Well done.

You said they contain information or they produce information. This is just trying to play both sides because you don't have a clue.

Matter and energy contain information. Examples are the mass of a lump of lead, the refractive index of a block of glass, the amplitude and direction of a force.

Matter and energy produce information when they interact. The lump of lead, interacting with the accelerative force gravity, will produce such information as its position relative to time, likewise its momentum, and a hole in the ground that, when measured, provides still other information.

Before we go any further, I would like for you to show me the experiment that shows matter has an objective existence outside our perception of it.

I refer you to the famous experiment regarding Dr. Johnson and the stone.

reply to post by Matrix Rising

Again, a dimwitted view of the Observer thinks the observer is simply looking at something. No, the Observer is making a choice to gather information. This causes a measurement to occur. The Observer's choice can even determine which measurement will occur.

How about you quit being dimwitted and stop dismissing what the observer effect really says.

although it is clear from experiment that an "observer" consisting of a single electron is sufficient -- the observer need not be a conscious observer.

You make up all this rubbish, twisting what science is really trying to say into some fantastical version of reality that agrees with your uneducated views. Taking science out of context does *not* make your views correct. Dismissing reality and history does *not* make your views correct.

The holographic Principle is based on black hole thermodynamics, Black holes are erroneously attributed to the works of both Einstein and Schwarschild, both of whom did not believe black holes were physically possible and that their works did not show at all. Schwarschild even went so far as to publish a paper refuting black holes.

MWI was developed by Everett to resolve the paradox of Schrodinger's Cat. Unfortunately for Everett, this famous though experiment was *never* intended to describe reality, but was only devised to show the absurdity of the math required to describe classical objects in QM.

Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility; quite the reverse, the paradox is a classic reductio ad absurdum. The thought experiment serves to illustrate the bizarreness of quantum mechanics and the mathematics necessary to describe quantum states. Intended as a critique of just the Copenhagen interpretation (the prevailing orthodoxy in 1935), the Schrödinger cat thought experiment remains a topical touchstone for all interpretations of quantum mechanics. How each interpretation deals with Schrödinger's cat is often used as a way of illustrating and comparing each interpretation's particular features, strengths, and weaknesses.

So there you have it ... A quick hacked together history lesson. Your version of the observer effect simply does not exist in reality. The idea's of the universe being a hologram is based on nothing more than erroneous math. The idea's of many worlds is based on nothing more than a thought experiment that was explicitly mentioned to *not be a description of reality*.

Now obviously Your just going to dismiss all this as usual. It's a shame though that you have to dismiss reality and history, just makes you look that much more uneducated.

[edit on 18-6-2010 by sirnex]

Does this mean I'm a character in someone else's video game?

Or am I still someone else, being placed into a video game?

I like video games.

reply to post by Astyanax

Right. You just contradicted your own thread title. Well done.

What's sad is he does that quiet often. Chances are he'll reply back to you telling you that you don't have a clue what your talking about.



[edit on 18-6-2010 by sirnex]

Originally posted by draevin
Does this mean I'm a character in someone else's video game?

Or am I still someone else, being placed into a video game?

I like video games.

Your neither a simulation or someone being put into a simulation. Your just a bunch of information projected from some mythical REAL UNIVERSE. We don't actually exist, but this REAL UNIVERSE does.

The OP is against materialism and really love's the matrix trilogy. He bases his weak arguments off misunderstanding of what the science he attempts to use is really saying by twisting it and he uses theories derived from faulty mathematics and thought experiments that were never intended to describe reality.

At most, it's an entertaining fictitious story line that melds the concepts of The Matrix and Sliders together. Actually, that would make a pretty decent show for SyFy Channel! Maybe that's what he's doing? Matrix, are you researching to make a new SyFy show and are just trying to get the science to be somewhat realistic to as best a degree as possibly can be?

Originally posted by loner007
Scientists discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. This destroys einsteins assertion that nothing can travel faster than light and that led some scientists to think of a hologram.

This led to the aquarium fish analogy...one fish and two cameras on the same fish with one camera in front of the aquarium and another camera on the side of the aquarium. Both cameras show the same fish but the fish movements are different. We may think they are two fish but there is only one fish.

So which is it...

(1) It is possible for travel faster than the speed of light

(2) We are viewing the same identical object in a different frame...an illusion

reply to post by sirnex


Again, you don't have a clue as to what you're talking about and you do this in thread after thread. In the last thread you threw out everything from Einstein, Quantum mechanics, theoretical physics and you butchered information theory because you tried to debate something you don't understand.

You said:

although it is clear from experiment that an "observer" consisting of a single electron is sufficient -- the observer need not be a conscious observer.

Again, this is a case of Sirnex pasting something he doesn't understand out of context.

What you quoted said nothing about the choice of the Observer. Did the electron make the choice to set up the experiment? Does the electron make the choice in the delayed choice or the quantum eraser experiment?

Again, if you have been reading what I'm saying, I have talked about decoherence and how nature can cause a measurement to occur. So, what you are quoting is meaningless because I've made that point over and over in this thread. Just because nature can cause a measurement to occur, doesn't reduce the role of the choice of the conscious Observer.

What you quoted supports what I'm saying. It doesn't say the choice of the conscious Observer doesn't cause a measurement to occur. What it says is that an electron can be an Observer and I have been saying throughout the thread that nature can cause a measurement to occur because of decoherence. You don't understand what I'm saying or you didn't read what I said before you ran off cutting and pasting things out of context.

You talked about Schrodinger's thought experiment and again you don't have a clue as to what you're talking about. Schrodinger's Cat has been debated by Physicist throughout the years because it correctly captures quantum mechanics and superposition.

They didn't understand decoherence and that basically answers the question. The cat would be alive or dead because the cat is a macroscopic object and would decohere into one state or the other and superposition wouldn't last very long because the cat interacts with it's enviroment.

Schrodinger didn't wish to promote the idea of a dead and live cat but he did. Schrodinger, like many others, understood what quantum mechanics said but they thought that it couldn't be right because it's too absurd. Einstein died looking for a theory of everything because he didn't like the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics.

What we have learned over the years is quantum mechanics is dead on. Even though, someone like yourself rejects quantum mechanics and lives in their own fantasy world, there's more than enough people who understand the implications of quantum mechanics. You type on your computer or talk on your cell phone because of quantum mechanics. Technologies from quantum mechanics make up something like 30% of the GDP. So you throw out quantum mechanics and live in a fantasy world but luckily most people are not this ignorant.

When people say that nobody can understand quantum mechanics, it's just a way of saying they can't accept what quantum mechanics says about reality.

You then talked about the holographic principle and black hole thermodynamics. Again, you're talking nonsense.

Why should I discount the work of Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein in favor of your rants and ravings on a message board? Should I just throw out the equations? You obviously don't know what your talking about and you throw out everything we know about physics in favor of some belief you made up in your head.

These people didn't just come to these conclusions. The math and the evidence led them in this direction. This isn't just talking about black holes but all matter.

The information of all matter is found in a 2-D surface area that's 1/4 the size of it's volume. This is true for a human being or a cube of sugar. You can calculate how many bits you would need to simulate a human being down to the quantum level.

What is this based on?

It's based on the fact that the entropy of a system correlates to how many bits it takes to describe a human being or a sugar cube. So no matter how you do the equations, these things have a correlation with each other.

Starting from theorems proved by Stephen Hawking, Jacob Bekenstein conjectured that the black hole entropy was proportional to the area of its event horizon divided by the Planck area. Bekenstein suggested (½ ln 2)/4π as the constant of proportionality, asserting that if the constant was not exactly this, it must be very close to it. The next year, Hawking showed that black holes emit thermal Hawking radiation corresponding to a certain temperature (Hawking temperature). Using the thermodynamic relationship between energy, temperature and entropy, Hawking was able to confirm Bekenstein's conjecture and fix the constant of proportionality at 1/4:

Although Hawking's calculations gave further thermodynamic evidence for black hole entropy, until 1995 no one was able to make a controlled calculation of black hole entropy based on statistical mechanics, which associates entropy with a large number of microstates. In fact, so called "no hair" theorems appeared to suggest that black holes could have only a single microstate. The situation changed in 1995 when Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa calculated the right Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of a supersymmetric black hole in string theory, using methods based on D-branes. Their calculation was followed by many similar computations of entropy of large classes of other extremal and near-extremal black holes, and the result always agreed with the Bekenstein-Hawking formula.

en.wikipedia.org...

What you don't understand is things like black hole thermodynamics and Hawking-Bekenstein entropy is based on entropy which you claim to love and Information which you don't understand.

So the entropy of a system correlates to it's information content and no matter how you do the equations you get the same result.

See, physicist explore these things because of quantum mechanics. They don't have any other choice. I know you throw out quantum mechanics in favor of your personal nonsense but I'm glad that most people don't do this and I can throw something in the microwave, type on my computer and make a call on the cell because of the quantum mechanics that you don't subscribe to.

See what I mean folks?

He'll continue along this unintelligent diatribe till he craps leprechauns and pisses rainbows.

But let us not forget... He is vastly more intelligent than what those idiot scientists are really saying! I mean Jesus Christ ... The cat paradox was explicitly mentioned to NOT depict reality in any way whatsoever and this buffoon pretends it does irregardless of a direct quote.

It's kind of hard to argue with the blind deaf and dumb.

Good luck to the rest of you, he made my point loud and clear!

reply to post by Matrix Rising


I completely understand how those results can be interpreted as if "observation" is making something happen, and how that can then be related back to the choice of the observer to observe or measure, (regardless that some say it shouldnt be linked to choice) but what if what we think of as "happening" (unfolding in the present) actually isnt?

www.scientificamerican.com...

As you read this sentence, you probably think that this moment—right now—is what is happening. The present moment feels special. It is real. However much you may remember the past or anticipate the future, you live in the present. Of course, the moment during which you read that sentence is no longer happening. This one is. In other words, it feels as though time flows, in the sense that the present is constantly updating itself. We have a deep intuition that the future is open until it becomes present and that the past is fixed. As time flows, this structure of fixed past, immediate present and open future gets carried forward in time. This structure is built into our language, thought and behavior. How we live our lives hangs on it.

Yet as natural as this way of thinking is, you will not find it reflected in science. The equations of physics do not tell us which events are occurring right now—they are like a map without the “you are here” symbol. The present moment does not exist in them, and therefore neither does the flow of time. Additionally, Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity suggest not only that there is no single special present but also that all moments are equally real [see “That Mysterious Flow,” by Paul Davies; Scientific American, September 2002]. Fundamentally, the future is no more open than the past.

I wish I could link to an article that could be read in full, but perhaps some of you are already familiar with the "time is illusory" of "an artifact of the mind" types of arguments.

Wouldnt that make it possible that we are not "conscious creators" and choosing our way through time and space, but actually just more akin to a video or dvd playing out the encoded information? Our brains being able to read the present, and record, (spottily) the "past" (giving an illusion of unfolding) but unable to read the information it has not yet past our sensory detectors, (the future?)

In such a universe, what would choice mean at all, aside from psychological satisfaction for those unaware of the fallacy of it?

reply to post by sirnex

Right. You just contradicted your own thread title. Well done.

What's sad is he does that quiet often. Chances are he'll reply back to you telling you that you don't have a clue what your talking about

Sometimes I wonder if I have psychic powers!

you don't have a clue as to what you're talking about

link

Thanks Matrix, I love the predictability of your unintelligible nonsense!