This is definitely a paradox or is it?

ImaFungi

Krazysh0t
reply to post by ImaFungi

 

And I am saying that there is no such thing as "any given moment" or rather that one person's moment is never the same as someone else's moment.

I shouldnt have to say you are wrong for you to know that you are wrong and you are wrong.

Of course there is any given moment. Time exists! Are your great great great great grandparents alive right now on earth? Could you give birth to your grandmother? Can you eat an apple before it grows? Can you recite Shakespeare before you learn language and to speak? This moment we exist in together right now is a given moment. 300 years ago (you know what years are right?) noone alive right now was on this earth, in that given moment.

You should go back and reread my post. I don't think you fully understood what I was explaining. I was iterating that since we experience the present in the past that there is no such thing as the present and therefore no past or future. Rather there are just infinitely many configurations of the universe that can be assembled in such a way to create a flip book. Have you ever thought that maybe time is just your mind playing tricks on you? I've already demonstrated with my initial post that your brain operates by processing information that has already happened. I've also demonstrated that time doesn't move at the same rate for any two bodies in the universe. Why don't you try opening your mind to alternate possibilities instead of just writing them off because they question everything you thought you knew as true? Your response reads like you barely even gave my post more than a skim at best and just decided that it was hogwash. I elaborated some distinct points that back up my premise and you ignored every one of them in favor of a childish retort to dismiss my argument completely as absurd.

ImaFungi

1. Something exists
   
2. Something cannot come from nothing
   
3. Therefore something has always existed
   
4. Therefore there is no 'beginning' to the existence of something
   
5. Therefore in duration, in temporality, the past is eternal/infinite
   

Something 1 exists
Something 1 cannot come from nothing
Something 1 can be formed by combining something -1 and something -2, something -1 and something -2 seize to exist.
OR
Something 1 can be formed by splitting something -1 into something 1 and something 1.1 Something -1 seizes to exist.
Therefore some something always exist but subsomethings can be limited in time and resistance.
Perceive the universe (with it rules about time and matter) as subsomething.

It reminds me of fractals.

If past is infinite and eternal,
Then is future ?
If we have always existed in some form, will we exist in another form forever ?
If yes, then is life just a checkpoint ? do we have other places to visit too ?
does our consciousness has many other forms that we aren't aware of yet ? like dreams ?

reply to post by Krazysh0t



No I read your post and comprehended it at the time I am sure. Is it possible that its not that my mind is closed to your ideas, but that I have thought of ideas such as those in depth for years, and carefully attempted to think of all possibilities, which has led me to the question I am posing and in the exact manner I am posing it? Even if the way you are discussing the universe and time is true, and it might be, it seems you are paraphrasing relativity, my questioning is still relevant. Even if the universe is like a flip book...that is time! It takes time to flip a flip book. If there is no such thing as time, but there exists a movie, and you know a movie is made of frames, a series of stills, it takes time to watch the movie, the movie is time, each frame is an equal increment of the movies time as a machine plays them in a steady speed. Time is not some...thing. It is only sequence, cause and affect, order of events. I am not talking about people or minds, I am talking about the stuff that exists that changes. The totality of stuff. I know the components of stuff changes at different rates, travels different speeds with different spins and is fundamentally composed of different qualitative behaving stuff, but in, yes, any given moment, all the stuff that exists, exists together at the same time. I am not saying we can calculate or know or keep track of that time (this is why realitivty was needed because there is no way to access that absolute frame of time reference...though it is attempted with things like big bang theory when a yearly number is put on that age of the total universe), but regardless of that the act of it all existing and doing its thing, is the universe keeping the time, or making or doing time.

You guys sound like you are talking about dust theory.

It proposes that time does not need to be linear, to appear linear.

You just need a bunch of moments which exist as moments of an appearing whole.

e.g. Your first breath could have been at the end of time and your last breath at the beginning of time, and you would not know, as long as those moments appeared linear to you in the "film of your life".

reply to post by ImaFungi


Awesome post bro!

reply to post by Itisnowagain


Thank you, brother.

I dunno why every time I read your replies, I feel relax.

peace

reply to post by ImaFungi


All of this assumes that the various configurations of the universe that we call moments of time are arranged in a logical order. What if we took the frames of that movie and shuffled them into a completely random order? Watching it wouldn't make any sense and you could never be sure of what had already occurred, what is occurring, and what has yet to occur.

I posit that we experience time the way that we do, because that is the only way it can make sense to us. If there existed a being that while one second it was in 2014 then the next 4000 ad then 10000 bc then 1932 and so on, we would never understand its life, but its mind and body would be wired to comprehend what is going on to it in a concept it could call time.

p.s. No I didn't consider that you had ever thought long and hard about the concepts that I've put forth, what with the childish way you derisively laughed at me for even daring to bring it up and all. I'd think that a knowledgeable and understanding person who had already contemplating then dismissed these concepts would realize it would be better to illuminate the person to the error in his thinking rather then mock them. But hey, what do I know?

Bleeeeep
You guys sound like you are talking about dust theory.

It proposes that time does not need to be linear, to appear linear.

You just need a bunch of moments which exist as moments of an appearing whole.

e.g. Your first breath could have been at the end of time and your last breath at the beginning of time, and you would not know, as long as those moments appeared linear to you in the "film of your life".

Wow, I've never heard of that theory before, but it makes a lot of sense in relation to what I am getting at. Though I'm not surprised that some other smarter heads thought of this concept before me. I by no means claim to be a genius.

Thank you for bringing this up. I have spent many hours thinking about this paradox myself. It highlights the absurdity of the present moment, as it seems that we exist at the edge of infinity. How can an infinite amount of time (or series of events) pass? How can anything have a beginning, when there is no beginning? Why did it begin now and not 5 minutes ago? Why hasn't everything already happened? Or has it? This is some tragic stuff.

Suppose we replace existence with the possibility of existence:
1. I exist, therefore something is possible
2. Something impossible cannot exist
3. Therefore, at least one thing has always been possible (for an infinite amount of time)

If we replace "something cannot come from nothing" with "something impossible cannot exist", you can see that we do not conclude that "something has always existed", but that "something has always been possible". This is a bit of a semantic thing, but I think the distinction is sound. It means that while at least one thing has always been possible, it need not have always 'existed'. If we allow for possible things to come into existence by chance, you can see how it may be possible to get around this 'edge of infinity paradox' and end up with a slightly less tragic existence.

interesting thoughts

I always thought that a paradox only exists in this form because we exist , if humans were not here to ponder the thought itself and to process the logic then there is no paradox, so I think a paradox can only exist if humans are here to have consciously thought of it in the first place.

A paradox is a result of consciousness

reply to post by ImaFungi


I understand your question, I believe and I also do not think there is a good answer. Not sure if there ever will be.

To incorporate another's response, I would say that regarding the Big Bang ... the singularity...it sounds like a black hole that got turned inside out, so to speak.

Perhaps we are caught up in an infinite sequence of Big Bangs...expansion followed by consolidation ... in that matter becomes trapped inside black holes, that eventually join up creating one massive black hole that reaches some kind of critical mass at which point it regurgitates becoming the next Big Bang.

As far as your sequence goes...the numbers you assigned are arbitrary. If you represent time in that manner then you could say that x+1=y as x or y approach infinity. This gives a steady progression "through time" in increments of 1 forever. There is no hint of a beginning, nor end even though to our thinking there always has to be a beginning and an end. Perhaps infinity is just too large of a reality for our finite minds to truly grasp. Perhaps we can vaguely understand the concept, but the reality escapes us.

Krazysh0t

Bleeeeep
You guys sound like you are talking about dust theory.

It proposes that time does not need to be linear, to appear linear.

You just need a bunch of moments which exist as moments of an appearing whole.

e.g. Your first breath could have been at the end of time and your last breath at the beginning of time, and you would not know, as long as those moments appeared linear to you in the "film of your life".

Wow, I've never heard of that theory before, but it makes a lot of sense in relation to what I am getting at. Though I'm not surprised that some other smarter heads thought of this concept before me. I by no means claim to be a genius.

The above is the basic premise for the novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. A fictional novel and a damned good read. The main character was experiencing time as it truly was, (in the book) totally out of sequence (if I remember correctly...been many many years since I read it) while everyone else was perceiving time in the way we do...sequentially.

There's always an assumption that the empty space between planets and stars of the space-time continuum is pure nothingness. But if it were pure "nothing" what stops it from deflating and having all the stars, planets, moons all just slurp together. So then it must have some residual energy that stops it from contracting, but also allows it to "stretch" and create a gravitational field when any atoms are present, and "contract" again once those atoms are gone.

Then the other aspects of particle physics are that if you try and pull some of the fundamental particles apart (the quark triplets), you'll only succeed in creating two new particles rather than two half-particles. Therefore space-time must then be "something" that is the same at the fundamental particles but somehow different. There's string theory that has the idea that each fundamental subatomic particle is simply a different type of energy string that is separate and can either be looped or unlooped. I'd like to believe that space-time is just a low-density tangle-ball of energy strings, and that the quantum flux is just the end of one string reaching the surface.

reply to post by ImaFungi


Like so many things I think it boils down to perspectives and definitions…

A framework which I could make sense time travel to work… hrm… I see time as a linear phenomenon that can be reduced down to a basic phenomenon of change. If time travel were to exist the best concept of future I can currently see fitting is that the future is not so much about our perceptions of the past or present states but would be described as change itself. The concept of past would exist as a previous instance of a configuration of energy (in this case limited by our perception). The present here would simply be what can be conceived or perceived as a current state (the moment that precedes the change or future). With time and the past viewed like that every change is the future (not the past) and what may be commonly considered the future is created simply by our expectations of change based on will and what we consider natural phenomenon.

If you were to want to contort your perception into viewing one perspective of a negative infinity working with what we "know" of in existence I think it could be lead down a trail to base components in various states of being. When I was putting together my own notions of possible beginnings of everything I arrived at a similar idea that there was always something (what we call energy). I wondered why it seemed so common that people I encountered seemingly believed the absence of substance or the hypothetical existence of true emptiness was the natural state of this dimension when we have no solid confirmation of such a true void existing.

ImaFungi
I am asking if there is an infinite series of events towards the negative, the past, how did we ever get to this sequence. Just as we can never approach a moment of positive infinity, only ever approach, how did we ever escape or leave the eternal past, there are infinite digits to the left, the past, it cannot be arrived at or grasped, no beginning.

In regard to how we/the something got to this place/state it is my idea that everything we know formed via (please bare with me here as it was just my mind trying to reveal a possible logical explanation to it all and as such… well it just sometimes goes) base reactions ever increasing in complexity related to the natural properties of said base material(s?) in various conditions/states possibly somewhat like what occurs in chemistry. In this way the beginning is graspable as if you kept going back the reactions would simply continuously somewhat chaotically occur. I absolutely hated thinking like that as that concept and many of the others ones I thought up around it introduced me to perspectives I did not like but they made sense to me as a possible how of it all to include comprehending infinite negative in regard to time (to borrow your phrasing).

I think I expressed that all in a way that would make sense… but it didn't address travel back through time so much.The problem with hypothetical time travel is you have to hypothetically figure out how it would hypothetically work. We mark time by the changing of states, with it being hypothetical it's possible what we might consider time travel would end up being direct deconstruction and reconstruction of the present state into a prior state which would be the future (change) to a previous state. Hypothetically this type of time travel could work given there were tracks/traces left by energy (which I currently think everything is ultimately composed of) which we could follow to it's previous state and through manipulation of a hypothetical force you could deconstruct and reconstruct that energy within whatever the field of influence was back down the path of the previous state (could you imagine the type of energy something like that would take to change everything we know!?). Anyway in this model of time travel arriving at the previous moment is simply returning to a snap shot of the state of things somewhat like restoring a computer's state to a previous point (this model is generated from my mind spinning so the idea of it makes sense to me… and I hope it does for you). This technically destroys the "present" (state of things based off of previous changes) and recreates the "past" but would certainly fit the bill of time travel. Theoretically in this model you would technically have to shield yourself and the mechanism from it's own effects unless the field of influence could be directed/projected but that's neither here nor there.

That is just one off the wall but logical given such things could exist method of time travel that paints every change as the future and the past simply as a state of things which given you could shield yourself from any harmful effects of what might have been you could follow into a graspable negative infinite.

You know in my laziness I chose to read the rest of the replies in my leisure and may have typed this all for nothing because it might have been proposed already… that's messed up. Anyway I hope this might serve as some type of casual snack food for thought or at the very least was coherente(I have been awake for a very long time).

reply to post by ImaFungi


The cycle of life exists in the smallest as well as the biggest. It just keeps going, always has and always will.

An entire Universe can arise out of Nothing, because "Nothing is Unstable".
At least that's the hypothesis.

Please watch this video by Michio Kaku on the topic where he explains why this does not violate the law of conservation:

Well if you calculate the total matter of the universe it is positive. If you calculate the total energy of the universe it is negative because of gravity. Gravity has negative energy. When you add the two together what do you get? Zero, so it takes no energy to create a universe.

Around 3 or 4 minutes he gets into how it is believed to possibly work.
Ya'll should also check out his book "Visions", which also deals with this very topic.

This is one of my favored ideas and I would like to see you folks consider it.

Sciencedump.com

muzzleflash
An entire Universe can arise out of Nothing, because "Nothing is Unstable".
At least that's the hypothesis.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. You being the ultimate word genie should know this. Either words have meaning or they dont. Either 1=1 and 0=0 or they dont. Either nothing =nothing and something=something. Or they dont. If you want to play semantics, there are plenty of random word generators you can play syntaxical patty cake with.

reply to post by ImaFungi


What if you imagne that the infinite is absolute neutral. A absolut constant. Takes up all Space possible. The time line of the infinite is absolute constant.

This means that all finite's are everything but absolute neutral "which is true". This puts all finite as posetive compared to the absolute neutral infinite.

Only finite can be posetive or negative compared to other finite's.
"Compared to the infinite all finite matter and energies are posetive". They can never be as neutral as the absolute neutral infinite.

what it should look like With numbers : 0 +1 -1

Not

-1, 0, +1

ImaFungi

muzzleflash
An entire Universe can arise out of Nothing, because "Nothing is Unstable".
At least that's the hypothesis.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. You being the ultimate word genie should know this. Either words have meaning or they dont. Either 1=1 and 0=0 or they dont. Either nothing =nothing and something=something. Or they dont. If you want to play semantics, there are plenty of random word generators you can play syntaxical patty cake with.

Yesssssssssss
How can you even discuss 'Zero' (Nothing) if it doesn't exist as "Something to discuss" ?
It's very unstable see?

Something is slightly more stable it seems.
What do you think? I would like to know your considerations as I could be off the mark.

Thanks btw Fungi for the jest, haha.

reply to post by muzzleflash

muzzleflash
An entire Universe can arise out of Nothing, because "Nothing is Unstable".
At least that's the hypothesis.

How can nothing be unstable?

Nothing must be absolute empty or it cant be nothing. It then becomes what ever makes it unstable. A absolute empty Space must be a absolute constant.

That means nothing must be: absolute stable/static.