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Originally Posted by mkirkpatrick I would like to propose that the universe is totally-full,choca-block full,so full in
fact that you could not even squeeze a dollar-bill in between any gap were there to be one... |
OK here is another view, which I have not seen anywhere else so let's pretend it's mine, all mine, ha ha ha!
Collectively and individually, human cognition and experience exists as searchlights into a darkness, as it were. Gallileo points a telescope to the sky and over time we map space. Assuming it lies on some graph paper grid out there.
There is obviously no shred of evidence that anything exist except at the exact moment you preceive it. Is the moon actually there if all the people are othewise busy and nobody looks at it?
All our science is a strucure to convince us, don't ask that question, little man. Only a fool or a genius asks that, and you, sir, are clearly a fool.
I am indeed weird, but very loveable, I just see what I see and attempt to be honest. I have no evidence the wall of this room is actually there until I turn my head to check. In fact I hallucinate everything beyond my visual field, as a visual map in my internal cinema. I hallucinate all the things beyond the reach of my skin and fingers with total confidence the yellow coffee cup will meet my touch and have the temperature I confidently expect and having drunk the coffee, it will not magically refill itself, I have to go to the kitchen, which is neither currently seen nor heard. But the hum of the fridge and the gas boiler, is that the familiar sound of water in pipes, and sounds from outside the house, all convince me on and on and on that reality is real and consistent.
Consistency is exactly what reality does best.
Collectively we see this and that star out there in the sky. The angle subtended between the stars in the belt of orion is very small, even a powerful telescope cannot make those stars more than the width of a cinema screen apart at the science museum.
Human beings will never ever have concrete evidence of any sort that the stars in Orion's belt are more than the apparently subtended distance. That's about oh, the width of my finger at arms length.
Cartesian ideas insist that we spread stars out on graph paper. As if God has the map and we peer over his shoulder. That is so esoteric it makes me puke.
I love a bit of esoterics, but for for erotic pleasure and ecstatic dance and the passions of being a shaman, not for sober empirical science.
I have no evidence the stars in Orion are wider apart than they appear to human eyes and instruments we invent. Yes, the model of Cartesian space fills the distance between them with light years of emptiness, criss crossed by photons and neutrinos and possibly planets and alien spacecraft, but why not drop the esoterics and declare, we are human and will restrict our science to the human limitations of our perception and at least be honest about that.
The light from Sirius travels a curving path, not a straight line, a) because of relativity theory (although correct me on this, photons have no mass? How does gravity affect photons exactly?). b) because I say so.
You may say things may travel in a linear path and I say go and worship Newton. The words of the prophet Moses Mohammed or Newton, no difference really unless you EMPIRICALLY test and retest and there is no test possible to find linear motion in a relative gravitational universe. Straight lines are in the Three Commandments, Laws of Motion, sure, and evident in the artificial fetish styles of our furniture and architecture. But "nature" and "orbits" have never ever ever used straight lines. Never.
Our delusion of three flat dimensions is clearly infantile. Moron soup. It takes great intelligence and courage to deny it, and you get beaten up by the worst most brutal most stupid people if you dare to think, so what IS the fabric of space and time, if it is not simplistic Cartesian in some frozen nevertime.
My current answer is the same shape as the oak tree or the Amazon river. The light of stars reaches us here on earth, and here is something to ponder, Euclid apparently thought light was emitted from our eyes to the stars, and the direction of the one way street was only reversed by a medieval Muslim scholar in a dim dungeon with a mirror. He'd failed to stop the Nile flooding and for punsihment spent many years in solitary confinement with only a light beam for company.
Imagine for a moment light from stars to our eyes as a TWO way street. Consciousness penetrates into "reality". Material form penetrates into consciousness. From each origin the shape is the roots of a plant.
Our total known universe is clearl the shape of plant roots reaching into whatever is unknown. What is not yet perceived is beyond a skin, a bark, of our tree of knowledge.
So michael, I agree that from our perspective, there is no space other than our minds penetrating into material and the ecstasy we feel in doing that. But the structure is for me dentritic, like an oak tree, and unknown to the tree, squirrels and monkeys and so on live in the space of the tree beyond our simple investigations, for all we know.