h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It is very late here, so this might come off like the ravings of a loonie, so if that winds up being the case, I will apologise now, so that I don't have to afterwards.

It seems to me that Relativity theory also indicates superdeterminism. I mean, according to relativity, there is no then or now, here or there, because all relationships of space and time exist only as ways for things within the system of the universe to be differentiated from each other. This might indicate one reason why the universe bothers to go to all the bother of organizing bits of itself into self-aware observers, so that a frame of reference can be established to allow these relationships to be established. But anyways, in relativity, an object 20 million light years from earth is accordingly 20 million years in our past as well. Viewed from outside the 'event horizon' defined by the outermost boundaries of space-time (which is expanding at the speed of light and hence doesn't really exist) those space time relationships collapse and the universe appears to be a region of singularity with everything happening all at once as it where.

I'm writing a book about this stuff. It's fun.

Anyways, Einstein himself grudgingly conceeded in his latter days that reality seemed to be largely an illusion, but he wasn't very happy about it. He did once say 'god doesn't play dice with the universe' but I suspect that was a bias of his western perspective, because any taoist would be happy to tell you that God plays dice with the universe every time a group of students sits around playing Risk or Backgammon.

Trivalent logic is offered as an alternative to greek bivalent logic and indicates that in addition to a 'yes' and a 'no' the universe also contains a 'amybe'. this is reminiscent of Chaos theory which is the study of informational systems on the verge of becoming dynamic (or not dynamic). Many worlds quantum theory is offered as another way out of this kind of quandary, every possibility that might be actuated, is, on some level. Also there is David Bohm's 'implicate/explicate order' which makes out the universe to be a big cd-rom game of potential outcomes, all of which are 'there' as collapsed mathematical structures but are only realized by an observer 'playing' the game. This is reminiscent of fractals which are complex and infinite mathematical structures of collapsed potential which are unlocked by interative observation.


PHEWF. What a mouthful. Drop by my page and talk to me about it, I love this stuff.

PHEWF indeed!

I'll be along.

OK. I've had a chance to look at this, and I'll do my best to express my woolly (and mostly spontaneous) thinking on these matters (mostly questions), coloured by my current mental state, which is, shall we say, fragile. (Insert your standard "apology in advance" clause here. I'd like to borrow it.) Here we go:

You say that "according to relativity, there is no then or now, here or there, because all relationships of space and time exist only as ways for things within the system of the universe to be differentiated from each other."

First, a question about the things we refer to when we talk about "all relationships of space and time".

Can't "all relationships of space and time" exist only as "all relationships of space and time"? Cannot, Mr. Freud, a cigar just be a cigar?

Second, if we look at the concept "all relationships of space and time" (as opposed to what we refer to when we use the term) it seems to me that the human mind (or at least the bit I'm using to think about this question) could be described as a relationship machine. We live a mental life immersed in relationships, like a fish lives in water. Does the concept "all relationships of space and time" only there because we (choose to?) experience the things refered to "all relationships of space and time" as having "relationships of space and time"?

Mixing both: Why should the Universe require a frame of reference for observer(s) to experience "all relationships of space and time" in order to existence as we experience it?

The Universe can do what it likes. It is, after all, the Universe. It seems strange to impose requirements on it.

If observers are needed, where are they? That may sound weird, but it makes sense, at this moment, to me. After all, we assume be are observers, as we experience observing, but if our nature is to experience observing, how could we not feel this way? (A sideshoot of free will again!). How does our experience of observing coincide with the theoretical requirements of observation in, say quantum theory?

The answer may be 'completely', and I do seem to remember reading that a dark adapted eye can detect a single photon(????), but we do seem to extrapolate massively upwards and downwards in scale from our experience of this scale of existence. The fact we find quantum reality counter-intuitive is comforting, as it indicates we are not too obviously imposing our 'home' scale on our findings, but my question is, what do we (you?) actually mean by self-aware observers, and how does this relate to the Universe's theoretical requirement for observation?

Is the glue which binds us as observers, at our scale, to the quantum world 'superdeterminism'? This is probably the point you made in your posting above. Using many fewer words.

(A (mostly humourous) side question - what happens if the required observers are not paying attention?)

Re. the expanding Universe, I never really felt happy with the 'further away is longer ago stuff'. This may be stupid (be gentle with me), but just because the light from somewhere doesn't reach me for some specific time, this doesn't mean that I can't conceive of it having a now coincident with my now. Sure, I can't (apparently) see what's happening there as it happens, I have to wait. I'm used to this. Its e-mail. I can't experience 'there' now, I can only experience 'here' now. Big surprise. Why can't everywhere share a now (in a time sense), even though we can't share a now (in an experiential sense)?

Or am I missing something?

Also, this expanding event horizon - again I feel I may need to distinguish (stupidly?) between the concept ant the thing itself.

The concept exists. The thing itself doesn't exist, but I don't think that's got anything to do with how fast it is expanding. If you have a bog-standard black hole, it has an event horizon insofar as we can describe this as the limit of that region where (fill in you own definition), but I don't see this as being any more existant than the edge of the Universe.

Things traveling at the speed of light (apparently) exist (or at least have observable effects), otherwise I would be calling the supplier of my computer monitor right now. So, if it doesent exist, I think that's because it is non-existant, not because it is very fast. We still need the concept, though, as otherwise we would have to wave our hands around too much.

Wasn't Eistein's comment more to do with the non-deterministic nature of reality, rather than its non-existance?

I like the many worlds interpretation, mostly because it seems to be a lot of fun.

Re. yes, no, maybe - Wasn't the mistake that people (actually relatively few, pointy-headed people) used to think that the world was deterministic? I also think that even those people who may have advocated determinism didn't actually believe it, in the absolutist sense. Newton was weird, but not that weird (or at least, weird in different ways).

We (we'll, not me personally) got to the moon using Newton's laws. That doesn't make NASA's staff a bunch of determinists. They just recognised when a particular approximation was good enough. Sensible, really.

Rereading what I've written, I see a ring donut, gently transforming itself by rolling inwards through its own hole. Interpret this as you wish. (and see apology clause.)

To me (see Free Will) the secret is knowing when to stop thinking.

And, indeed, writing.

well that is quite an earful and I'm going to have to think about how I'm going to reply to a good deal of it. I believe you have forced me to tip my hand and reveal my bias though; I think free will exists also, and I don't think it contradicts a knowledge of a superdeterministic universe, to quote Qui Gon Jinn, your focus determines your reality to some extent. This sounds terribly mystical and magical but it has all kinds of applications even just as a social mechanism; you can choose to exercise choice! In my view of things, wise people are those who relate to themselves well enough to know what they are doing and why they are doing it, and can in fact make choices about who they are. In other words, wise people have more 'free will' than common folk. My guess is that Free Will is probably a trick humans are capable of doing, like a dog walking on its hind legs, and that most of the rest of our behaviour is better regarded as stimulus/response... drop the hot potato... get angry when insulted... buy jeans at the Gap because the Tv tells you to...

I'll come back later and drop a line on relativity... i unfortunately only have about 10 minutes to make these posts or the computer hangs up on me. Thanks for the very good questions though, becuase I love being able to refine my views on things by having them challenged. When I have a response ready ill post it here or post a general essay on my page.

Cheers

BTW, the "many fewer words" bit of my posting referred to my own prolixity, and was actually a compliment to your relative pithyness. I've just seen that it could be misinterpreted.

Ok, I think the best way to address your comments on relativity is just to offer my own viewpoints on what the theory portends; i'll be summarizing a lot, and I might as well mention at the outset that these views of mine tend to stem from the free use of marijuana rather than from a grasp of the intricate mathematics involved, so if it seems rather contrary to logic, see if you can grasp it intuitively instead.

Ok, it seems that relativity theory describes time and space as one medium, which is to my way of thinking superdeterministic. It is true that an object 1 light year from you is 1 clock year in your past; it is conversely true that you are 1 year in that object's past. There is no, as it were, universal clock.

We experience time as something in motion, a linear process where things are left behind and remain ahead. And so it is, from a certain point of view. But keep in mind that the planet we live on is in fact 'moving', ie changing position relative to other points of matter within the system. If you take into account the speed of its motion around the sun, the speed of the sun's motion relative the the galaxy, and the galaxy relative to other galaxies, and so forth, you realize that we are moving through the spacetime medium at about half the speed of light. The medium is itself 'stretching' outwards at approximately the speed of light. My guess is that our sense of time's linear motion comes from all that moving around of parts... we experience the motion of space time being dilated by its expansion, sort of like a balloon being blown up. Of course we have no real way of completely grasping this any more than a ball rolled along the ground has any hope of suddenly changing direction.

More to come in another post... I've got the flu and need to go lie down.

Ok, now in addition to time and space being the same thing, we also know that matter and energy are just aspects of the same stuff, freely interchangeable, and that the speed of the stuff relative to the speed of the restof the things in the universe is what determines whether it is one or the other. We also know that this thing called 'gravity' is in fact that space-time stuff shaping itself around matter, but that's just a short-range effect, the fact is that really space-time itself is a product of matter, and gravity is simply a readily noticeable effect of this. Space time exists to keep pieces of matter apart from each other, and to keep things from happening all at once, but it is not an absolute, it is entirely relative to the perspective of the piece of matter being differentiated.

We also know that space time seems to be curved back on itself, so that travel in any given direction eventually brings you back to where you were before, theoretically. Also, the given 'boundaries' of the universe seem to be flying outwards at roughly the speed of light.

Let's take a moment here and suppose that the universe, with a radius of oh 15-30 billion light years, is being observed somehow by something, oh, 200 billion light years away from it. I recognize that this is contradictory in several ways ; i'm offering a thought experiment in classical terms. To that theoretical observer, all the internal relationships of that system, space, time, whatever, would not be relevant to an observation of the whole, would not in fact be visible in any way whatsoever because no information about it has made it this far out into the void. The universe would appear as being there all at once, basically, with no here or there, before or after. What would be observed (actually not observed) would be a phenomenon of singularity, with its own dimensions curved about it, from which no information escapes. Sound familiar? This kind of phenomenon is not totally unknown to astronomers of earth... they are called black holes.

OK to take this a bit further.

Einstein himself was a brilliant man, but I have contended for
a long time now that intelligence describes one ability to work
within a given paradigm, and that wisdom is the trait that lets
us switch outside of our current view of the world. Einstein
spent a good deal of time in heated arguments with a rival
of his, Niels Bohr, who was working on Quantum Mechanics at the
time. The 'god does not play dice' thing was a statement uttered
during one of these debates, but could not reconcile his own
theory with the apparent contradictions offered by the
uncertainty principle. Towards the end of his career, Einstein
seems to ahve changed his mind a bit... he said something to the
effect that 'it seems reality is playing a ghastly joke on us...
i feel that a curtain of illusion is being dangled just before us,
and as we are on the verge of seeing through it, it jumps just
ahead to maintain its opacity'. My guess is Einstein was frustrated
with the cognitive paradox inherent in trying to build a complete
model of reality out of mathematics, linguistics, and other such
limited resources. No model, after all, could exactly match the
real thing, or it would BE the real thing.

But then again, that makes the assumption that man is somehow APART
from the rest of that which is, observing things without effecting
them in any other way. This is not so much the case. First of all,
the universe itself is the thing doing the observing here; a human
observer cannot claim that he is not a walking, talking, thinking,
feeling, observing chunk of matter/energy. So perhaps our limited
observations and models suffice for the purpose for which we
intend them; whatever the case, the very act of observation of an
event is part of the event taking place. This becomes most apparent
in observation of quantum phenomena (where a photon basically has to
be bounced off the observed object, thereby disturbing the system
in the process), but is a good rule of thumb on even a large scale
of looking at things, especially in a superdeterministic framework...
how is the piece of the universe observing the event any less valid
than the piece of it causing the event to happen? It is all, as it
were, part of the same big event.

David Bohm was a nobel-prize winning physicist in the 50's or 60's
who spent 15 years in India studying metasystems under a Hindu yogi.
When he came back into mainstream science he proffered his theory of
an implicate order and an explicate order. The implicate order
is that level of reality where everything is enfolded 'holographically'
as it were into one big sphere of potentiality; the word holographic is
used as a metaphor here, the idea being that if you smash a glass
plate imprinted with a hologram, one of the pieces of that plate will
still contain all the information that the entire plate had contained.
The explicate order is the level of reality where that information is
'projected' so that it can be actaulized. ( I rather liken this to
my view of being 'outside' or 'inside' the theoretical 'boundaries' of
the universe.)

This does also bring me back to fractals, but I have rambled on
enough, except I wanted to say that Hindu poetry expressed fractal
realities back a couple of thousand years ago, and I wanted to remind
you that fractals are 'fractured dimensions' and also a geometry of nature'. They tend to describe nature as being nodes of collapsed mathematical potential unlocked by the application of an iterative formula.

What all this means for free will.

The future, the past, and the present, are all pretty much the same thing. Time is a funny thing; even the present is hard to nail down precisely. Is there a quantum unit of time? A smallest moment? 10^-googleplex of a second? Likely not. By the time you realize the present is the present, it has become the past.

So, really, it's a done deal. Everything you are ever going to do, you have done, and are doing, along with the rest of the universe.

However, as you pointed out so astutely, the universe can do whatever the hell it wants, and that is more or less what you are... that part of the universe which wants to do things. It's a participatory process, really. That cognitive paradox which keeps you from seeing things as they really, actually are is also what makes it possible to make choices about things, which is what you are doing, right now. And now. So yes, you do have free will, and just because to a different observer it might seem that you have already made the choices, remember that from your point of view said observer hasn't yet observed that choice. It's, ah, RELATIVE In that way I think SUPERDETERMINISM and FREE WILL get along sort of nicely.. I probably could have just pointed out that any superdeterministic model of the universe would have to include free will as part of it by necessity, and saved myself a lot of typing, but ah well. I type fast.

Not easy to jump into this conversation with so many ideas being thrown around.

As far as the universe is concerned, I don't believe it's a 'done deal'. I think the four-dimensional picture of the universe interpreted from Einstein's mathematics has been misleading. It is important to point out that relativity theory does not deny the possibility of an absolute now, only the possibility that we can determine it. The difference is subtle, but extremely important. Relativity shows us that it is impossible to determine whether two events are simultaneous. However, it does still allow for the existence of a frame of reference where those two events could be simultaneous.

I believe there does exist such an absolute now, and that this point, the present moment of flux where the future is being continuously transformed into the past, is all there is. In a sense there is no time, only process. And that is where our free will lives.

Hence the cognitive paradox. We cannot determine absolutes, we can only approximate them. Because we can only determine things in a relative sense it becomes meaningless to make assertions about things in an absolute sense. This goes right back to those zen koans again... if a tree falls in the forest, blah blah blah. Because of this inherent limitations on all model-building efforts, I tend to not care whether things are 'true' or 'false' so much as whether they are meaningful.

My thinking is this; you cannot make a distinction between the observation and the thing being observed; any observer is by definition part of the same cosmic process as any event that might be observed. This sounds a bit grandiose and mystical, but it is sound. You are that part of the universe which observes things; as far as you can determine, universal processes are relative and dependant on observation. Therefore, they are, in any meaningful definition of things.

It's not that I think direct observation of an event actualizes it directly so to speak; the universe is far more subtle. But I think the fact that measurements and relative observations are part of the overall pattern is important. I think such a mechanism allows a context to be established from which all other relationships can be 'bootstrapped' as it were.

We have trouble taking this step; western thinking is founded solidly upon the idea of a 'them' and an 'us'. But to an eastern way of thinking there is no conflict here; the observer and observed are manifestations of the same underlying pattern.

I've been thinking a bit more about how to clarify this; ie my assertion that relativity implies the lack of a universal clock. You seem to regard it as merely implying the lack of our ability to perceive the universal clock so to speak.

I guess the only problem I have with your view (and the reason I decided to choose the other one) was because of the time-dilation effect of travelling at lightspeed. If there was a universal clock, then an object travelling through it would simply move very fast in terms we can readily picture, and its rate of travel through 'time' would not be effected at all. My guess is that the reason behind time dilation is because objects moving at the speed of light or close to it are matching the 'dilation' of space-time caused by its expansion and activity; hence time stands relatively still for that object.

My mind keeps going back to that ball rolling along the ground... from its perspective it is moving in a straight line along a flat surface... however on another scale, it is rolling 'around' the surface of a much larger sphere... or perhaps that sphere is moving by underneath it. I expect we have about as much of a chance of grasping the nature of time as the ball does of grasping the shape of earth.

I've been thinking about time for about two years now, and I'd love to say that I've got some great insights, but I haven't. But. thinking about linear time it would appear that everything HAS to be predetermined. To say that we posess free will is to assume that we can turn the time line in a way that it would not normally have gone.
So, apparently, either everything IS predetermined and/because there is only ONE timeline or,
There are many timelines.

If there is more than one, it seems that there must be an infinite number. To say that these are dictated by the free will of humans seems more than a little vain, so I would say that they would (maybe must?) be dictated by the probabilities of quantum events. In this case, free will is again out the window, but the number of possible timelines/possible universes is NOT infinite, but a staggeringly huge number according to how many quantum events have happened anywhere, ever.

But then I thought that time is not a dimension as such, but movement. You can't have one without the other.

Then, I thought, "hang on, that's a bit vain too". To imagine that there is a lump of mostly water (me) moving through a steady-state 'it'. Perhaps I am just a tiny particle in a microscopic eddy of probability and a chaotic system.

How the hell would I know if 'time' slowed to a crawl, or accelerated, due to forces and factors beyond any glimmer of comprehension?

Then I went empiracal. Give theoretical the boot for a while.

I noticed that there seemed to be periods in my life so far (I haven't lived anyone else's) where things were steady. Same job for years, same girl, same car, etc. At other times, I changed jobs, girls and cars in the same month. Since time is the passing of events or a way of separating them, is MUST speed up and slow down, as the events that I noticed happened in groups(ish). Maybe cyclically, or in a sine wave.

There would be denser events, or quantum leaps at the peaks of the wave, and sparser towards the center.

Can we do anything about it? Free will?
Yes, I was surprised to discover.
We could recognise whereabouts we were roughly on the wave by the density of events, and plan according to it.
perceiving a short-cut across the peak is probably thinking outside the linearity of travelling along it. Maybe.

But I doubt it.

There you go, a time-based link between relativity and quantum theory, and maybe free will.


BTW i AM a bit of a taoist and I don't think of these things when a bus is coming towards me, I get out of the way.


Also good for a look is the clock based on 'Einsteins dreams'. At http://www.einsteinsdreams.com/index1.htm#

I'm not sure I quite get your argument, but to clarify mine I should say that I don't buy this picture of a four-dimensional universe where all moments, past, present and future are given the same substantive reality. It has never felt intuitively right, mainly because it surely leads to a strong kind of superdeterminism. I feel that the universe only exists as a slice of this four-dimensional picture. Relativity denies us from being able to determine the precise shape of this slice, but, in my opinion, it exists in an absolute sense.

One way of looking at it might be to think of it as the frame of reference of minimum kinetic energy. I think it is reasonable for one frame of reference to be a better quality frame of reference than another, even though both may be valid. If we push an electron in a particle accelerator to close to the speed of light, the frame of reference where the electron is at rest is a perfectly valid frame of reference as far as the laws of physics are concerned, but there is a strong sense in which it is not such a good frame of reference as the one where the Earth is at rest. The fact that one frame can so obviously be preferred to another suggests to me that there is an absolute frame of reference, and therefore time.

What do you think?

Actually, could I get you to rephrase that thought in more detail? I must profess I am primarily a pothead janitor, and a bit of a sophist, and I require thought experiments in particle physics to be spelled out a bit so that i can follow them

An absolute? Hrmm... from what I can tell relativity implies either 1> there is NO absolute or 2> we cannot tell if there is an absolute and cannot make any meaningful assertions about what such an absolute might be, or my view, 3> both are the case.

Again I come back to my little high horse about truth and falsehood. We cannot establish with certainty whether anything is 'true' or 'false' and we are left to discuss 'meaning'. By assuming that our relative observations of reality are meaningful we assume that reality itself is dependant upon relative observation. The universe DOES measure itself (and you're kidding yourself if you think we are the only manifestation of it doing so, but anyways) so what else can we infer?

I'm tempted to put more down but I'll wait for your reply. I really think we shuold set up that page we discussed in the other forum (and I agree, let's move the discussions here for now).

Awaiting your reply -

First, what I am supposed to call you gargleblap master of relativistic sophistry? A simple nickname would be really helpful.

I'm aware in retrospect that my position wasn't stated with great clarity - which is usually a sign that one's own understanding is somewhat less than complete. And that is certainly the case. I am not one for rushing these things, so please bear with me while I compose myself, and some suitable words. My life at the moment is being ruled by two extremely lively young boys whose mother has left us alone for two weeks. I better let you know that my responses may be slow over the weekend because I've acquired a serious sleep deficit which I must do something about.

We need a name for this page. Any ideas?

How about calling it 'the Zebra crossing' (semi obscure nod to Adams' works) for those wishing to prove that white is black and vice versa. . I'm patient.. joolsee has been sort of quiet for a while and I imagine he's still cogitating... I don't think anyone's in a rush. Good luck with the kids, drop me a line when you've had a moment's rest.

-1 Imposing?
I'm eagerly awaiting the next installment!
How about:
'Recursive Thoughts'
or
'The Universal Time Machine'
?
-1

The theory of relativity states that all laws of physics are the same for all observers in uniform states of motion. According to the theory, there should be no preferred reference frame, yet clearly there is because the relative motion of the galaxies is very small. Also, it is possible to detect our own motion (the motion of our own galaxy, the milky way) relative to the cosmic background radiation, which works out at about 600km/sec. If there was no preferred frame, then we should see much higher relative velocities. For me, the implication is that this preferred frame is an absolute frame which provides an absolute 'now' for all observers. It is in this 'now', the continually evolving present moment, that reality exists.

We cannot know this for sure, but I still think it is meaningful to discuss it. The cosmology we hold to has a subtle but significant impact upon the way we live our lives. If we believe in a truly four-dimensional spacetime where past and future have equal status, or believe in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory where all possible outcomes have equal status, I tend to think we are less likely to assume the kind of global responsibility I have discussed elsewhere. In my cosmology there is no reality to the future, and no reality to the past other than the imprint of the pattern of history. There are no other universes either. I believe this universe of ours to be heavily populated by life forms, and that we have a cosmic ancestry that goes far back in time beyond the age of the Earth. There, my cards on the table now!

Returning to relativity, I hold myself to be a very extreme relativist, but in a wider sense than that of Einstein's relativity theory. The only meaningful thing in the universe is 'difference'. It is the differences in form from point to point that give rise to observable phenomena. Duration and length have no intrinsic meaning on their own; it is only differences in duration and length that we can quantify. It has to be emphasised that time dilation only represents a dilation of time as perceived by external observers. Relativity is all about information. Lengths and durations change in appearance to us, but not in a material sense. I believe there is an absolute frame in which we could theoretically define a meaningful duration and length but is not relevant in our universe. We don't need it. Likewise with scale. I believe the universe does have a scale (obviously) but it is not relevant to the laws of physics. We don't need to know anything about it.

Finally, I extend my relativism to time in a still deeper sense. Time has no intrinsic meaning on its own. It is only given meaning because its rate is changing. It is the difference in the rate of time from moment to moment that actually defines time as we understand it. On that contentious note I shall let you ponder. I'm aware that I've probably confused the issue even more, but my thoughts took this track and I decided to go with them. Minus-One, good to know you are listening in. And Gurgleburp, come on, a pseudonym I can remember.

Hrmm... how does a relatively slow rate of galactic movement imply an absolute frame of universal reference, either temporally or in any other sense? Why would the lack of a preferred frame make our own galaxy seem to move faster compared to the background radiation? I'm not sure I quite grasp the reasoning here... even so, couldn't you presumably set up a context where the galaxy's movement was compared/contrasted to the relative velocities of other galaxies and/or superclusters? There are particle physics models, known as 'bootstrap' models, where theoretical particles have their properties determined by a self-consistent comparison to other points within a given frame of reference (say, a series of points on a mathematical plane). It seems to me similar calculations might apply on macroscale models as well.

Assuming you are right about the preferred frame, is it the absolute frame because it is preferred, or is it preferred because it is absolute?

Well, social responsability does go hand in hand with a settled view of the universe, I agree. I'm not sure how you can say there is no reality to the future or to the past, since by the time you have finished reading this sentence, one has become the other. If anything I would say it is the present that is in question, a clumsy relative approximation of things cudgeled out of our painfully slow-to-fire neurons. As for there being no other universes... hrmmm. It is hard to make a really meaningful assertion about that one, since so far we can't even define what constitutes one universe. I might remind you though that a study of the fractal 'geometry of nature' tends to reveal a tendency for a fractal set to contain infinite variants of itself within defineable boundaries (the shape of which defines the value of its fractional dimension). I agree, the universe we can see probably does have a lot of life on it... I think life and consciousness are pretty obviously imminent parts of the fabric of nature. I'm sure there is other sentience out there too, or was, or will be (relative to us of course), although I would guess it to be a lot more rare. As far as alien intelligence seeding us here, or giving us a black monolith or whatever, it would explain our rather sudden arrival wouldn't it. I know some people who think aliens are still guiding our evolution (by shoving things up our arses, apprently) But again... hard to assert meaningfully.

You echo the words of a fellow who recently quoted to me a book of yogghic wise sayings, something to the effect that 'uniqueness is the foundation of all'. You are partly right that differences give rise to observable phenomena, but it would be equally true to say that observable phenomena give rise to differences; since we are talking about reality on a scale where causality sort of goes out the window it might be worth clarifying this viewpoint a bit. Regarding duration and length, again I agree, and I think here you are really echoing my own views about time and what it portends. Time dilation; hrm, that point cannot be addressed in one sentence; somewhat unfair of you to throw that in the middle of an otherwise coherent paragraph I agree that relativity is all about information, and in fact most metaphysicists now are saying that the best way to think of the universe is as being composed of information. My point is that information has to be read out somewhere in order to be such. Hence consciousness, the I AM of metacosmic process. Lengths and durations to change depending on our relative view of such things; but not, you assert in a material sense. Dear sir, just what is a 'material' sense? Is this that preferred frame of reference of yours? But if the material sense is in fact pure information being organized and actualized by interaction with conscious observation, then what is the difference exactly? My guess is that the nature of reality and 'material' is exactly what is at issue here. We don't need to know anything. We choose to, however. It is for this it seems we are driven to exist.

I agree... time is a specifically sentient concept in one sense, yet in another the universe does seem overall to be related to linear process regardless. So is that linearity a subset of universal being or is the universal being a subset of linear process? I think this may be what we are disagreeing on.. I tend towards the former view and you tend towards the latter one. My guess is that both views are meaningful, and aspects of the overall scheme. I'm not sure if I agree that difference from 'moment to moment' really defines the concept in question, for again a definition of moment becomes impossible outside of this discussion (unless we are going to start talking about chronons now).

Regarding what all this has to do with free will and day to day life, there is a zen saying that I think sums it up well; 'Before studying
zen, mountains are mountains, trees are trees, rivers are rivers. While studying zen, mountains cease to be mountains, trees cease to be trees, and rivers cease to be rivers. After mastering zen, mountains resume being mountains, trees resume being trees, and rivers resume being rivers.' I don't think an awareness of reality on a macroscale necessarily subverts an awareness of it on the human scale... hopefully each can complement the other.

Call me whatever the long name is just a spurious attention-getting device.