Problems with materialism

[austintorn@aol.com]

Are you truly seeing outside your own mind or not?

We only ever see the insides of our heads; the same model is employed when we are awake as when we are in a night dream, such as I was in most of today.


If we sidestep the problem of what created it all and simply say that there never was a beginning and that everything has always existed, though when taken all at once it appears rather indistinguishable from nothing specific at all (imagine a space symmetrically filled with every possible thing and all its mirrorings and compliment - the space would just appear as a solid nothing because there would be nothing specific to interact with in it).

Yes the total information content of Everything is Nothing.

It’s not a sidestep, but is the truth. Since there was never a beginning to the causeless bottom of the ‘bubbling’ quantum level, there is no problem of what created it, for it never was, since it was always ‘there’, as you say, and never had to be created. As particles and universes do get created from it, there is only the investigation of these materialized particles. Necessarily, within the quantum level itself from which particles are emitted there can be no order, no design—just the fundamental indeterminate chaos that we observe in its randomness. We are on one of its rnadom paths.

This ‘causeless’ is the greatest discovery there ever was! It is the Super Toe, ‘Super’ because it is of the ‘before’ side of materialization. The regular Toe then picks up on this side of materialization to explore the workings of the particles and forces.

We are on a certain path, one that is workable, which we are not even amazed to marvel at, for otherwise we wouldn’t have been here in this way to note it. Our consolation to this determinism is that the path is unique. While it is in principle predictable, no one ever has nor can it probably ever be calculated. here might even be 50-50 events that could go either way. Our road is probably even one of the most workable paths that there could be, it having gone this far, with no end in sight. It seems that we won the lottery.

Some don’t want to accept the causeless exept in some other way that gives us purpose from a Designer. But this and any such schemes could not be the bottom end point, for then we would only have to confront the workings of the DESIGNER behind the Designer, eventually reaching the true causeless, reducing the Designer to a smart alien. But it doesn’t go this far anyway.

The way it did turn out way also the way it had to be, plus, the fact of there being no purpose, turned inside out, is to know that we are free of any puppet strings and those other kinds of commands, leaving us free to enjoy life and make our own meaning out of it, at least confined to this particular path, within the limits of our form therein, of course. Enjoyment is not taken away, for our felt being is not the same as the state of the actual being beneath. When in love, for example, we don’t just give it up since we know that some of it is from bonding hormones.

In review:

Alain Aspect, using Bell’s theory, has proven that the bubbling quantum level is a random and indeterminate chaos of no order, that there can be no local hidden variables within it, but for the impossible nonlocal superluminal; thus, finding further that a near ‘nothing’—the quantum fluctuation or tunneling—is indeed the causeless bottom ‘something’ that is as simple as it gets, this ‘something’, by the way, being the completely natural state of affairs, rather than a total Nothing being so, confirming the thought experiment that a total Nothing couldn’t do a darn thing, it not even being able to be ‘there’ to make anything anyway, plus knowing that there cannot be never-ending causes beneath causes, and that therefore the causeless bottom must be of maximum disorder rather than any order, much less a perfect order. This near ‘nothing’ of the ‘something’ of the quatum realm is unstable, as, too, it must be, these kinds of phase changes and further complexities from simplicities going on all the way up to our own composite complexity.

Thus, the causeless bottom needed no creation. Anything Else is not only cut off at the source but is also not even required since the normal state of affairs is this quantum ‘something’, not Nothing. So, the great philosophical question of why is there something rather than nothing is squashed, for it was stated backwards to begin with.

Science even then finds, as a bonus, that the universe appeared from a state of near zero energy, this being, of course, within the unavoidable and tiny quantum uncertainty, plus that the negative energy of gravity matches the positive energy of matter, equaling a net mass density of near ‘zero’, as close to Nothing as it could get, and further, again, that every time we try to measure what an atom does, we get a different answer, this then indicating the answer is that that realm beneath is causeless.

Furthermore, that quantum/Planck realm is of discrete operations—the quantum leaps and the Planck instants—even wiping away the notion of any universal continuity.

Another bonus found is that the ‘laws’ of point-of-view invariance automatically appear [are not handed down] in any model that does not single out a special moment in time, position in space, and direction in space, such as back at the Planck time of the big bang, the universe having then no distinguishable form, place, direction, order or time—meaning that it had no structure and thus that the conservation laws apply.

All that remains are some fun but unnecessary ponderings such as whether the wave function goes all the way up, meaning that the achieving of some mammal consciousness [evolving in the spuerpositioning potential form] may have collapsed the wave function of he universe from the inside, real-izing all, or if the rather enduring stable particles emitted the beginning of the are the real, either from the beginning or at least after the actual-izing of the universe by consciousness observing. This is all just fanciful for now.

Life is here; we have been thrust into it; we must deal with it; it is fun; and now we have the satisfaction of knowing whence and why it came about.

[SteveA]

Also, as my initial post had pointed out, what is often considered to be an ideal in science - deriving a set of physical laws that are capable of perfect prediction and being able to sample physical states to determine the current evolution of physical states, ironically appears to have no value.

There would be little purpose in constructing such a system because it would simply derive what would unalterably be, without providing alternative or enabling the effectivity of ones actions.

It currently appears that we're already fated to know the future anyway, so even the predictive component would not be useful.

Instead the foundations of science appear to require they be built in response to conscious desires and provide the equivalent of tools in the form "If you act according to A, X is the result, and if you act according to B, Y is the result etc." or alternately "If you desire P, then action C is required, if you desire Q, then D is required, etc."

So the attempts to explain consciousness as arising from deterministic physical processes appear to fail and the additional attempts to simply hand-wave such influences aside instead remove the value from the system.

Of course, I'm not claiming that wishful thinking or reciting mantras etc. cause miracles, but when you dig down, I think you'll find that even the wildest fantasy worlds, in order to exist in a coherent and persistent manner, require the existence of specific rules by which they operate - as an example, if we were to assume instantaineous teleportation is possible, there are detailed requirements involved in this that can't be overlooked - for example, if some controlled manner in which an object is to be moved from "here" to "there", then we need a reliable mechanism to identify or define the object as well as the particular locations involved. We also have additional considerations, such as what replaces the space left behind by the object that was "here" and what occurs to other things at the locations that are "there"? Does the edges of space surrounding these volumes compress and all the points on the perimeter coincide? If so, how can such a singularity be untangled in the future and what distortions to space occur as a result of this etc. If the objects within each volume (which additional requires a manner to specific it) are swapped, then how are components within each space localized in order to retain an equivalent relationship to the surrounding space, etc.

If something contains paradoxical elements then these can't be present simultaineously, and if such complimentary states are still required to exist, then they must be separated by time and the luxury of having both now is not possible.

So I tend to see that most anything is possible, it's simply a matter of determining how it can be possible and then whittling away at the components that deny it existing until there's nothing left but for it to be real (of course it's quite likely that by the time you've completed such a thing, it no longer resembles the magic it initially did, simply because you had to pull back all the veils and turn on all the lights to get it work initially, though if you step back and squint a bit to blur out the details, it can still come close ).

Anyway, I think, for better or worse, the sciences are probably closer to art than many people suspect and much of what's claimed to be rigorously proven or experimentally verified is only reliable within a very small window of application, if that, and fail to remain valid when they're generalized upon.

[austintorn@aol.com]

I am going to reveal that we can see, observe, and record the quantum biology happenings. This is an amazing age in which we live and a stupendous day, indeed.

Our Entangled Life and the Extraordinary
Evidence of the Extraordinary Claims So Far

Sciam: Graham Flemming has some lasers spitting out pulses of light just millionths of a billionth of a second long. After traveling through some mirrors and lenses, these minuscule flashes disappear into a smoky black box, in this case containing proteins from green sulfur bacteria, which ordinarily obtain their energy and nourishment from the sun. Inside the black box, optics measured to billionths of-a-meter precision detect something extraordinary: within the bacterial proteins, dancing electrons make seemingly impossible leaps and appear to inhabit multiple places at once!

Following the exotic rules of quantum mechanics, photosynthesis derives its ferocious efficiency of over 95%. We can perhaps harness great amounts of energy to help humankind.

This is all absolutely mind bending! The crossing of seemingly forbidden gaps is, again, called quantum tunneling. Classical physics cannot come close to achieving these speeds found in quantum tunneling and entanglement. Christopher Altman says that many new experiments continue to find quantum processes at play in biological systems, a process once thought not possible.

Life’s quantum dance has finally come into view by using the fermosecond lasers and nanoscale-precision positioning. It’s amazing beyond words!

Now, back to the green sulfur bacteria. Flemming and his researchers zapped the connective proteins with multiple ultrafast laser pulses. Over a span of fermoseconds, they followed the light energy through the scaffolding to the cellular reactions centers where energy conversion takes place. As described earlier in the thread, they saw that energy travels in several directions at the same time, finding the efficient pathway retroactively when the quantum process collapses. Then the electrons’ energy followed that single, most efficient path.

Perhaps we can someday manufacture cheap solar power out of organic molecules.

As for the enzymes and the tunneling also observed there, two studies, one published in ‘Science’ and the other in ‘Biophysical Journal’ have found that some enzymes appear to lack the energy to complete the reactions that they propel; the energy could only come from the quantum realm.

Consciousness/Action Explained

Consciousness mediates thoughts versus outcomes
And is distributed all over the body—
From the nerve spindles to the spine to the brain—
A way to actionize without moving.
So, yes, consciousness is spread out.

Quantum consciousness could be behind the quick collapse of the scenarios of consequences into probable/likely actions and/or thoughts.

As long as a ‘thought’ finds a solution, it could just as well be the nearly instant brute forceness of all quantum-type paths being and evolving in superposition.

Real particles are excitations in quantum fields that have a very useful degree of permanence and can be observed. As for virtual particles, they can be turned into real ones by supplying enough energy.

Wiki: The corpus callosum is a structure of the mammalian brain in the longitudinal fissure that connects the left and right cerebral hemispheres. It also facilitates communication between the two hemispheres. It is the largest white matter structure in the brain, consisting of 200-250 million contralateral axonal projections. It is a wide, flat bundle of axons beneath the cortex. Much of the inter-hemispheric communication in the brain is conducted across the corpus callosum.

When the corpus callosum between the brain hemispheres is cut, along with some other connecting areas, to grant relief to those having hourly epileptic seizures, the right and left hand can then work in opposition to each other, neither knowing what the other is doing.

[Sometimes, one hand will even do something ‘bad’, such as choking one’s neck, but the right hand will come to the rescue, as in ‘my hand is killing me!’.]

There are other examples, too, but, in short, it is seen that the person now has two minds, two consciousnesses and two selves. Of course, the brain stem still sends common signals to both hemispheres and to the visual system and to some others that still inform both sides.

This shows, yet again, that the brain is the source of consciousness, mind and self.

After death?

The brain dies and takes consciousness with it to the grave, for consciousness is the brain’s varying analyses taking the stage in turn, and and is not anything independent of the brain.

Consciousness is the brain’s perception of itself as coming up with thoughts and feelings from the memories and associations and all that that have become us.

Sciam again: Mind, self, soul and consciousness are all of the same source: the brain and its processes of its two hundred billion neurons connecting.

A side note is that the brain seeks out all alternatives, some becoming conscious and some not. It is the prefrontal lobes having to do with good planning and reasonable behavior that prune away [bad] alternatives, as they are seen to be full of mostly inhibitory circuits, [thus giving us a kind of ‘free won’t’ that lets the [good] will through.]

The brain, as with all organs, is/was made of cells made of proteins and more, directed forth by DNA that remembers all of evolution.

Of course, then we know that molecules are made of atoms that were first made and spewed forth by stars and supernovae. The atoms were made of protons and neutrons, made of quarks, and electrons.

Getting down to the fundamentals of quarks and electrons and such, they were made of energy, appearing as mass through m=E/CC.

As for what we are, neither you nor I are anything special. We are just brains having thoughts.

How the brain utilizes energy and refreshes it

The brain is amazing and can sort a 100 million bits of informatation in an instant. Consciousness must play an active role in the functioning of the brain, for both evolved together. They are intertwined in a process.

Consciousness must still yet tie into the regular physical. So, how is consciousness mediated in order to interact with the physical world? It must be at the synaptic cleft that what we call ‘mind’ qualitively meets the brain proper. Here is where the neuron fires or not; here is where a neuron meets other neurons. This must be where data turns into thought. Whatever triggers these switches produces thought in consciousness.

But how does consciousness operate? The nonlocal properties of quantum mechanics must play a role, for any of the real physical forces such as elecromagnetic, weak, and stong would be too disruptive and/or not have enough reach.

Consciousness is of a quantum biological nature; so, then, it is tied to the quantum mechanical process. The electrons reach everywhere, tunneling and hopping about, then take the most useful path, perhaps globablizing the results of the synapses by selecting a thought or an action from the superimposed scenarios of the action’s consequences. This is the will selecting a course.

The long-range electron tuneling that connects synaptic firings throughout the brain into a self-substaining pattern is consciousness.

This contact, then, between synapses and electrons, reaching across the whole space of the brain, turns on the light of consciousness.

Consciousness occurs above a certain synaptic firing rate and sleep ensues below the limit. Sleep is to allow the ground state to be refreshed. Consciousness has to pause for restoration when it gets worn out. This was so important that evolution retained sleep, a time of grave danger to any species.

Melanin (what is it doing inside the head?) absorbs many of the electrons, but not all of them. Sleep accounts for the rest, allowing molecules to relax their excited states.

[austintorn@aol.com]

(supplemental to my previous post)

Consciousness Thoroughly Explained

Consciousness is not a magic word for something mystical, but is a part of the physical process of the brain. It is therefore not at all a thing in and of itself that can just ‘float around’, nor it is ever the beginning of something, but sometimes the middle and often the end of a brain process.

Consciousness is the continuation of the process begun by the senses, memories, learning, associations, and the brain. It is higher in humans, than, say, in dogs or cats, which have kind of an extended present of just a primary consciousness. A dog might remember to stay away from a wood stove from which it got burned but it does not ruminate afterwards or make plans about the problem.

Our secondary or higher consciousness in which we can be conscious of consciousness allows us to symbolically ponder the experiences of life. We might even move the wood stove that we bumped into since it was too near to the path to the bedroom.

Does consciousness make us pull back from the heat of the stove when we touch it? No, that was a reflex, but the pain was ‘felt’ in consciousness, as well as the ‘seeing’ of whole scene of color, odor, touch, and taste of the event. Was consciousness the first response? No, consciousness was the last to be informed of the painful experience, after which we absorbed the experience, thought about it, and perhaps did something else as a result.

Whatever it is that the brain does to achieve consciousness can be stopped by anesthesia when it dissolves in the oily regions of the neuron microtubules. The brain then stays active but it does not produce any consciousness until the anesthesia is taken away. The same kind of result occurs when you faint. Consciousness is therefore surely of the brain. As such, consciousness can be turned off and on by the xenon or isoflurane gas of anesthetics.

It then, never makes sense to say things such as consciousness produces everything, for it neither comes first nor can it produce its own inputs. In fact, it is produced only by what precedes it. It is a subject—a witness of experiences. Then, as a global experience, the experience gets remembered for future use.

So, consciousness is not the self, the soul, the ego or any such thing; it witnesses what our subsystems do, whether they present good or bad behaviors. Consciousness is like a stream in which experiences can surface and flow as what is on the mind to be observed.

Quantum Biology is the Key

Sciam web: In the bacterial proteins having to do with photosynthesis, dancing electrons tunnel to other places kind of all at once, as happens within the quantum realm, and produce energy at a staggering efficiency rate of more than 95%.

Instead of haphazardly moving from one connective channel to the next in the scaffolding of the cellular reaction center, the electron solar energy travels in several directions at the same time; then, at the end, collapses the quantum process, retroactively finding a very efficient pathway from its ‘random walks’.

This kind of thing is also be happening to produce consciousness in the microtubules of brain neurons, in that a scenario of consequences is reduced to an action or a thought.

Each brain neuron contains hundreds of long, cylindrical protein structures that serve as scaffolding. Anesthetics affect how some of the electrons in these regions behave, interrupting the neurons’ delicate quantum process.

The microtubules normally are squashed and elongated at the same time since electrons are superimposed everywhere about the neuron. These constantly shifting sections, due to quantum entanglement, have an impact on other sections. It is in the faster-than-light subatomic communication that consciousness is born.

Entanglement is not, like the name might suggest, a hopeless tangle of a mess of strings, but a dynamic quantum-mechanical dance of beautiful gyrations of that which is ever affected and continues to be.

Consciousness is a unified brain state. It contains what is on the mind that came from the brain.

Perhaps the entire universe even had a quantum wave-function that came to be successful retroactively, but that is just a ‘perhaps’.

Awareness, self, source, reality, and being are again of just plain ‘consciousness’, awareness being a focus, still of the brain and all it contains, ‘reality’ being interpreted and given a much better face that’s painted with colors, forms, textures, lighting and more. Being is the experience of what comes into consciousness.

Your self is made up of your memories, experiences, learnings, associations and memories, and it is quite specific and tailored to what you have become up to now: you. You are, in fact, unique in the history of the universe.

Some people think that consciousness is a mysterious thing, so, by language alone, they reverse it to be the first of all instead of being near the end, treating it as a thing instead of a part of a process, then even make it nonphysical and supernatural—a complete opposite of what it is actually shown to be, but that’s human nature and language for you—one that likes to apply capital letters to promote a wish.

Consciousness observes the narrative center of gravity of one’s being and living. Consciousness once seemed mysterious but it has now become ‘effable’.

It also plays a part in the sense of smell. Odorants’ molecule shapes fit the nasal receptors, but that’s only the first part of the story, since some molecules have the same shape (with just one atom making a difference). It turns out that the same superposition of electrons and tunneling described earlier gives the molecule a vibration pattern of electric current that finalizes the smell presented to consciousness. While pinanethiol [C 10 H 18 S] has a strong grapefruit odor, it near twin pinanol [C 10 H 18 O] smells of pine needles.

It’s also seems, as we say, that consciousness can summon a particle into being. Maybe this real-ized and actual-ized the entire universe into [real] being and so, now, all is here as actual, everything else having evolved up up to the point of consciousness in a superposition ‘possibility’ type way as we see with the quantum realm, but all that is but my incomplete and optional ponderings.

[SteveA]

We only ever see the insides of our heads; the same model is employed when we are awake as when we are in a night dream, such as I was in most of today.

Yes, that appears to be the only way to get around the mind/body duality/dichotomy. In many ways it's just as equally valid to say that everything is either mental or physical - there's only one conscious perspective that a person has and no way to step outside their own perceptions. Even something like an out of body experience is still part of the same string of conscious experiences ... though maybe there's some funky way that multiple timelines could somehow be integrated together to generate something else, but I don't even think that would work - likely the only way to have more than one perspective would be to simply construct a second conscious space with new conscious perceptions and rules of interaction that were not related to the first. In that case the two views would be independent, though maybe even having a memory of both would somehow still place them into the equivalent of a single space (I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud)

Yes the total information content of Everything is Nothing.

It’s not a sidestep, but is the truth. Since there was never a beginning to the causeless bottom of the ‘bubbling’ quantum level, there is no problem of what created it, for it never was, since it was always ‘there’, as you say, and never had to be created. As particles and universes do get created from it, there is only the investigation of these materialized particles. Necessarily, within the quantum level itself from which particles are emitted there can be no order, no design—just the fundamental indeterminate chaos that we observe in its randomness. We are on one of its rnadom paths.

I basically agree with your comments here and at least in one respect, yes, it's not sidestepping an issue. If we're to expect everything has a cause, then we're left with an infinite chain of causes of effects that stretching beyond the horizon and we're always left with the question of how it all began, but that's a perspective from within a timeline of causes and effects, but if we instead look at existence on it's broadest scale, there's no reason that it ever had to not exist.

But still, the question of why someone experiences some specific component of it at any moment and not something else remains, so such a view does not supply individual causes or circumstances, but it still does appear much better than being continually stuck with the question of how something arises from nothing (there's always the problem of the initial asymmetry or a creator in the background etc.)

So there's still a question of why specific events with certain qualities are experienced at any moment, but this becomes more individualized in explaination - it's a matter of trying to understand why you're here (at a specific point with "The Everything") right now, instead of trying to explain how everything came to exist.

This ‘causeless’ is the greatest discovery there ever was! It is the Super Toe, ‘Super’ because it is of the ‘before’ side of materialization. The regular Toe then picks up on this side of materialization to explore the workings of the particles and forces.

Yes, if we're going to construct a system of evolving deterministic, rule based interactions the chain of events must lead back to something without a need to be caused by anything else.

Hmmm... there are some interesting possibilities here ... there might be more to consider. Existence, beyond physical boundaries doesn't appear to require a cause, it's simply the space of all possibilities (and I guess could even include some irrational areas as well), but as I mentioned above, there's still the individual question of why am I here right now. On a similar note, it's interesting to consider whether or not there would be individual reasons for an individuals existance that may also not require any cause, or possibly something for which a cause is unimportant or irrelevant ... there could be something there.

We are on a certain path, one that is workable, which we are not even amazed to marvel at, for otherwise we wouldn’t have been here in this way to note it. Our consolation to this determinism is that the path is unique. While it is in principle predictable, no one ever has nor can it probably ever be calculated. here might even be 50-50 events that could go either way. Our road is probably even one of the most workable paths that there could be, it having gone this far, with no end in sight. It seems that we won the lottery.

I apologize if this isn't entirely related, but regarding your comment on determinism. I think all uncertainties and unknowns can (and logically should) be bundled into a single unknown (and in many ways creative) influence over time. There's no need to add any uncertainty beyond a single one, because a single unknown, over time is capable of constructing anything.

Such an unknown would also not be in any way a deterministic part of "self". If I take my own comments here seriously, then I'd have to agree that I am entirely deterministic, though not with respect to the "unknown".

Something to consider here is that perfect randomness is not influencial in any specific way. It doesn't play by logical rules and has no coherent influence relative to logic and the same is true in the opposite sense - logic can't generate randomness, nor interact in a logical manner with something random. The two operate by incompatible rules.

I don't think an ideal randomness is describable in any specific sense, but consider that there is not inherently a conflict a between logic and randomness - randomness can't do anything specific and logic can't spontaineously generate things to compute. I tend to see it similar to the relationship between chaos and order, though in some ways there may not be any need to denote either side as specifically one form or the other - relative to the organization of the other they are different and possess a relative entrophy. Relative to themself, each is stationary and a perfectly ordered unity (and, I believe, incapableof change).

Here's an interesting example - consider viewing a rotating crystal. Lets say you spin it 20 rotations and then stop. Now inspect the crystal again - did it change in some manner to denote it had rotated 20 times? If so, I don't think it's obvious - if it was perfectly rigid, then it should remain the same after rotating. In that case, where does the information regarding the 20 rotations exist? The counting of the revolution was something you did - you witnessed the rotation of the crystal - whether or not the crystal saw you rotate around it isn't particularly relevant, someone else might have been there observing the same thing, but they rotated around the crystal a single time while you spun it and to them it rotated 19 times - obviously the crystal did not specifically rotate 19 or 20 times, as unbeknownst to either observer something else witnessed it rotate 5,219 times!

The rotation of the crystal occured via a change in yourself - you were the one who remembered it and decided what features were relevant to observe etc. If you had some extreme form of memory loss or learning impairment, even the existance of something as pervasive as gravity would not be coherently recognized as you could fall down one minute due to gravity and wonder what happened as you got up, only to repeat the same incident for the 1,000th time and never recognize the pattern.

(I'll reply to the rest of your post a bit later)

[SteveA]

Some don’t want to accept the causeless exept in some other way that gives us purpose from a Designer. But this and any such schemes could not be the bottom end point, for then we would only have to confront the workings of the DESIGNER behind the Designer, eventually reaching the true causeless, reducing the Designer to a smart alien. But it doesn’t go this far anyway.

Whether or not there is such a "Designer", I'm not particularly concerned as I can't believe such a being could create the "essence" of myself - it may be that the entire universe was custom designed by something beyond my ability to comprehend, but I don't believe such a being could control whether or not I exist, and though I may have either ignorantly stumbled into a human shell or intentionally desired to watch the show from this perspective, there's an aspect of my existence that depends upon nothing else.

So I'm not very much focused on trying to know whether or not the universe had some particular design intended - I do tend to think that finding intellegent aspects to it is rather unavoidable though, even if it's simply because it's being witnessed by intelligent observers.

Of course when arguments arise over who gets the right to forcibly speak for such a hypothetical creator, then we can bump into problems.

The way it did turn out way also the way it had to be, plus, the fact of there being no purpose, turned inside out, is to know that we are free of any puppet strings and those other kinds of commands, leaving us free to enjoy life and make our own meaning out of it, at least confined to this particular path, within the limits of our form therein, of course. Enjoyment is not taken away, for our felt being is not the same as the state of the actual being beneath. When in love, for example, we don’t just give it up since we know that some of it is from bonding hormones.

You made some interesting points - it would be nice if there was some obvious purpose, but then again, if such a purpose was dominant, that would potentially come at the expense of individual freedom.

This is one of the issues I've still been trying to figure out and it appears to be something that will remain important to me in understanding. On one hand, there are pleasures that are enoyable to pursue, but then again it's not particularly enjoyable being driven by emotions that are subject to "external" influences.

I can think of some potential reasons why such external forces may be required - if a system exists in time, then change appears inevitable and some equivalent force imposing a requirement for change could be seen, but would such a force be required to exist as externally determined?

There may not be a way to build a logical "stairway to heaven", but I can't help wondering both if a figurative heaven is something possible and if so how can it become real.

If heaven is defined as a single state of absolute perfection, then it would appear something to be at most transient (within time), but it's interesting to consider that this could simply be a naive/poor definition - if we change the point into a line or bar, and we lower the bar some (), there could be a way to fit an infinite space inside. Ultimately the only critical factor with respect to emotions appears to be whether or not something is perceived as lacking or wanting and I know from personal experience that there have been periods of time in which everything was perfectly fine in the world and there was nothing that needed to be changed or different. If there's a realistic boundary to where heaven exists I'd draw, that would appear to be it and not the concept of it as a singularity (which would appear something impossibly rigid and non-encompassing - then again, I'm open to suggestions on the subject).

In review:

Alain Aspect, using Bell’s theory, has proven that the bubbling quantum level is a random and indeterminate chaos of no order, that there can be no local hidden variables within it, but for the impossible nonlocal superluminal;

Superluminal communication is only required to not appear deterministic relative to subluminal communication. It's not actually denied by relativity and if we consider that the construction of space is something learned over time, mistakes can travel much faster than light (I'm actually rather serious).

There are also some interesting correlations between the properties of conscious intelligence and superluminal communication (I can give some examples another time .. getting late here)

[quote]thus, finding further that a near ‘nothing’—the quantum fluctuation or tunneling—is indeed the causeless bottom ‘something’ that is as simple as it gets, this ‘something’, by the way, being the completely natural state of affairs, rather than a total Nothing being so, confirming the thought experiment that a total Nothing couldn’t do a darn thing, it not even being able to be ‘there’ to make anything anyway, plus knowing that there cannot be never-ending causes beneath causes, and that therefore the causeless bottom must be of maximum disorder rather than any order, much less a perfect order. This near ‘nothing’ of the ‘something’ of the quatum realm is unstable, as, too, it must be, these kinds of phase changes and further complexities from simplicities going on all the way up to our own composite complexity.[quote]

Consider that the "bubbling", quantum fluctuations and randomness you're referring to are asymmetries - they wouldn't inherently exist within a perfectly symmetrical "Everything", even though everything could have always existed (though I guess I may be hypocritical in saying that such an everything, that supposedly includes all things, somehow specifically excludes asymmetries ... hmmm, interesting).

But this was why I called it "sidestepping", not that it sidesteps the problem of how something comes from nothing - as you point out, such a view effectively shatters the problem into a million pieces, but we still need an asymmetry to explain the existance of specific individual experiences within it. There's really no tradeoff involved though as that's still a question when trying to explain what caused the universe or the (perception of a) Big Bang.

Thus, the causeless bottom needed no creation. Anything Else is not only cut off at the source but is also not even required since the normal state of affairs is this quantum ‘something’, not Nothing. So, the great philosophical question of why is there something rather than nothing is squashed, for it was stated backwards to begin with.

I do agree. Why was it believed that nothing exists? It would appear that if everything was perceived simultaineously, this would be effectively indistinguishable from nothing (specific) at all.

Also, even if everything included some form of absolute nothing, how could it be witnessed? Wherever such an absolute nothing existed, it would appear to, by definition, exclude an observer so I don't assume assume someone could be sitting in the middle of nothing watching it, because then it would not be nothing, but instead a space containing an observer.

I think the real motivation behind such a question is founded upon the question of whether or not time can end and it appears there are paradoxes that arise if we try to constrain time to being something that is finite. Which leads to a question of how infinite times could possible be perceived, and it appears that the qualities of conscious perceptions supplies the solution to this - the conscious qualities of perceptions surrounding the physical quantities we interact with do not themselves appear quantizeable in any finite manner - in fact, potentially an infinite number of conscious entities could witness the same event at the same time, and each via. different conscious qualities and there would exist not problem with sustaining an infinite timeline through all this because each observation was uniquely determined with distinct qualities different from any other.

Science even then finds, as a bonus, that the universe appeared from a state of near zero energy, this being, of course, within the unavoidable and tiny quantum uncertainty, plus that the negative energy of gravity matches the positive energy of matter, equaling a net mass density of near ‘zero’, as close to Nothing as it could get, and further, again, that every time we try to measure what an atom does, we get a different answer, this then indicating the answer is that that realm beneath is causeless.

I agree that at some point the chain of cause and effect needs to be broken, and likely no finite deterministic system can avoid this, though an infinite system despite being deterministic, may be able to construct the equivalent of indeterminism because the current result would potentially be reliant upon information that hasn't yet been witnessed - but then again, it may be simply the infinite component that's responsible for an equivalent randomness and whether or not it's deterministic could be irrelevant.

Notice that informationally, even the selection of a single real number potentially requires an infinite energy or quantity of information and I tend to prefer placing as many unknowns as possible into a single source of uncertainty, so it would appear best to shirnk down the unknowns into the single unknown thing, which could even be a single random binary digit, if its influences could be accumulated over time as that's still a potentially unbounded randomness, just as random and unpredictable as multiple sources.

[SteveA]

Furthermore, that quantum/Planck realm is of discrete operations—the quantum leaps and the Planck instants—even wiping away the notion of any universal continuity.

Yes, the continuities arise from trying to pass a nice curve through discrete points and extract some law regarding their relationship - the wave function of a photon is not physically "real" in the detection of a single photon, but is instead a statistical correlation constructed across groups of discrete photons - such an idealized continuous version will never be measured precisely.

Consider the proof known for thousands of years that the square root of 2 is an irrational number and impossible to precisely measure no matter how smaller a ruler you had. There's a hint that nature is giving us that such an idealized distance is not physically constructable and placing a ruler across the diagonal of a physical square does not prove with infinitesimal accuracy that is does either - consider that distances between spaces are dynamic constructions over time and some structures that appear stable on macroscales are almost certainly not static on finer scales. (There are some interesting insights into gravity and time dilation here also - Einstein was working on Brownian Motion and diffusion before he came up with relativity, if we realize that quantum mechanical processes are almost certainly tunneling and diffusing into space, we can derive much of relativity simply by apply statistical measurements to systems undergoing a diffusion outward in space - the Earth is expanding and pushing you up, the Moon travels away from the Earth, but it also diffuses and the relative expansion of unit metrics for distances makes the Moon appear to be pulled closer and hence it appears to remain at a stationary distance and rotate instead of moving away in a straight light - you don't get sucked into a black hole - it comes out and hits you in the face - of course black holes emit energy in this form as well and this diffusion leads to Hawking Radiation etc. and if we coordinate this diffusion in a single direction via acceleration, then no lateral motions occur and the internal dynamics of an object appear to slow or stop its again and we can even derive the same equation for time dilation by using a grid or discrete matrix to space as well and the obvious small scale but pervasive diffusion of space via. quantum mechanics provides the mechanism for such a diffusion)

Another bonus found is that the ‘laws’ of point-of-view invariance automatically appear [are not handed down] in any model that does not single out a special moment in time, position in space, and direction in space, such as back at the Planck time of the big bang, the universe having then no distinguishable form, place, direction, order or time—meaning that it had no structure and thus that the conservation laws apply.

As another comment - I think conservation laws can be rewritten in terms of a subjectively constant rate of perceived time. Sorry for drifting a bit, but it's late and I need to sleep soon

All that remains are some fun but unnecessary ponderings such as whether the wave function goes all the way up, meaning that the achieving of some mammal consciousness [evolving in the spuerpositioning potential form] may have collapsed the wave function of he universe from the inside, real-izing all, or if the rather enduring stable particles emitted the beginning of the are the real, either from the beginning or at least after the actual-izing of the universe by consciousness observing. This is all just fanciful for now.

Life is here; we have been thrust into it; we must deal with it; it is fun; and now we have the satisfaction of knowing whence and why it came about.

I agree that it can change your outlook on things once you recognize that there's an eternal aspect to existence. In that respect, nothing is every created or destroyed, there's only the known and unknown or forgotten. Consider that everything you do is already leaving an indelible imprint on this universe and whether or not you remember something in the future, you still left behind permanent physical record (for example, if you move your hand, the acceleration transmits a counter force through your body and into the Earth with transmits this acceleration as a wave that diffuses, but does not disappear. Of course the motion of your hand also alters the motion of the air that cross interacts chaotically and fractally unfolds in relationships that expand in the future, now the question appears to be over how to better predict what these influences are so that it takes a bit less work to get the desired results).

Thanks for all the comments and again, have fun.

[austintorn@aol.com]

Lets say you spin it 20 rotations and then stop. Now inspect the crystal again - did it change in some manner to denote it had rotated 20 times?

Maybe it disturbed the molecules around it, even the energy in a so-called vacuum.

[SB_UK]

Thoughts arising from the last series of post

---1---
Quantum wave collapse results in the realization of one (current) reality -
from
(previous to collapse) -
-> a series of possibilities.

== (in effect) ==

---2---
The mind results in realization of one (current) reality -
from
(previous to collapse (ie prior to decisions being made)) -
-> a series of possibilities.

example
-----------
The stove was shifted from left middle to less frequented right corner of our kitchen following a burn too far.

---3---
The idea of evolution to complexity (where each layer - like a stair (although novel) - bears the same underlying geometry (mechanism for navigation)) -
- permits us to extrapolate our understanding of one (relatively well understood) abstraction layer to another (less well understood layer).

---4---
---1--- and ---2--- represent an example (like the duality) of just this repeating pattern.
The same basic process shifting only in context (context == abstraction level).

---5---
Our problem is that (as SteveA mentions) -
although there's a continuous line which connects different abstraction layers -

-> the continuous line is 'obscured'.

---6---
::Q::
How is it obscured?
::A::
By the line turning through 90 degrees -
we can't see around corners.

---7---
_|_|_| ....... 3
_|_| ....... 2
_| ....... 1

We're incapable of experiencing |
(it's orthogonal to our _ _ _frame_ _ _ of reference) -
- and so we observe this continuous (as SteveA mentions) structure -
discontinuously :

_|_|_| ....... 3
_|_| ....... 2
_| ....... 1

- only the horizontal surface of the stair is observed (understandable).

(this idea removes the need for human intelligence in the evolution of human intelligence)

... ... ... and the point of this post is ... ... ... to suggest that even though we know that there's a transition between abstraction levels -

pre-physics -> physics -> chemistry
(as well studied well accepted examples of an unequivocally smooth transition)

- we're prevented from adoption of perspective of the actual transition which occurs between these abstraction layers -
- the transition occurring in a space which is orthogonal to our plane of reference.

What are the practical implications of this idea?

We can understand that reality is made up of abstraction layers
- which absolutely must connect -
however -
we're absolutely not able
(from complete knowledge of previous layers
(eg physics)) -
- not able to generate a model for the behaviour of structures which'll be deliverables upon higher relative levels (eg chemistry in this example).

[A]
We are limited in that we can only understand each level as discrete microcosm.
Within its microcosm -
- absolute internal consistency (sense) is made.
[B]
We can understand that there's a connection between juxtaposed microcosms -
- we can know that the same mechanism is applied to permit transition between pre- and post- evolutionary microcosm -
[C]
However we cannot characterize the behaviour within future microcosms -
- with only complete knowledge of (even all aspects of) immediately previous microcosm or abstraction layer.

We need to be on that higher abstraction layer and be given the substrate (post-evolutionary event) -
as starting point for studies.

It's the reason why we study physics and chemistry in different University departments -
differing expansions require differing tools for enquiry.

We could study the largest part of chemistry without any allusion to physics.

... ... ... and the point of this post is ...?...?...?....

That derivation of consciousness may not be necessary in order to understand it -
- we don't need to (and can't) predict the properties of the elements of the periodic table from only complete knowledge of proton, neutron and electron -

- instead -
- if we simply attempt to reflect our knowledge of the mechanisms which're shared between each abstraction layer
onto (relatively poorly understood) novel level

alongside identification of the novel component which seeds consciousness (0,1,2 -<- logic)

- and then to commence its study upon its own level -
within its separate University department
(using rules for emergent structures defined by the Union between rules obtained from all University Departments which study reality)

- our process of understanding consciousness then unimpeded by the impossible task of rederiving consciousness from first principles.

An attempt at a summary
I'm trying to suggest that rederivation (bottom-up) of emergent properties can be proven to be an impossible aspiration -
- and so we needn't bother -
especially since we've a better mechanism for gaining step-wise understanding.

That better mechanism is to reflect the shared geometry of all abstraction layers ('Union' - from above) onto the current layer of scrutiny
(consciousness - in our (mind of man's) case)

- and to begin our studies afresh
on that new abstraction layer.

~*~

->- Feeding ->- back into the ideas of SteveA and @@@ above of the commonality between wave collapse at the quantum level and consciousness.
and of the mysterious nature of duality -
- the mysterious nature of duality which is also found extensively within Eastern and Western schools of Philosophy.

[SB_UK]

Lets say you spin it 20 rotations and then stop. Now inspect the crystal again - did it change in some manner to denote it had rotated 20 times?

Maybe it disturbed the molecules around it, even the energy in a so-called vacuum.

eg sun/moon

- the energy released from the ~10 billion year evolutionary cycle of the sun -
- comprising lower level cycles (for instance relative to Galactic Centre)

- results in life on Earth.

The energy of a system undergoing regular pattern or cycle - involving dissemination of its energy to a very definite time-frame (10 billion years here) -
results in other structures (eg life on Earth) being driven to evolve (to complexity) -
to absorb energetic bio availability.

~*~

Motion (then) with a Universe of fixed internal energy -
- representing transitions of energy from source to source -
driving local evolutionary event -

- the clockwork model for Universal functionality -
where one cog must put in place a replacement -
before it itself fades away.

An image
--------------

Internal cogs in a clockwork mechanism appearing and disappering -
though where the entire internal clockwork mechanism of many many many cogs -
may be modelled as a single cog (outer Universal bounds) -
one large wheel which turns to one regular sinusoidal pattern -

- one cog which reflects the total work done by all internal structures
summed.

More simply
------------------

- a tandem upon which two people cycle at a regular speed can be modelled as a bicycle with only 1 rider -
- with respect to work done.

All we require is weight and plot of speed.

If we imagine 10 tandems being ridden at regular speed in different parts of the world at the same time -
then they too can be compressed into

one 'effective' cycle
(with weight and speed)

- the one 'effective' cycle representing the Universal constant of energy contained herein.

~*~

Suggestion
------------------

Complexity density

The suggestion that the sun is a rotating spiral formed from a motorway
and the mind - a rotating spiral formed from cycle path

- although the same complexity of structure is formed between sun and mind
(here)

meaning that one wouldn't be able to discern any difference between the two
- if the same sized photograph (of the two)
- were laid side-to-side

- imagine then
the two
to bear the same basic spiral pattern -
(although with markedly differing total energetic contents)

- markedly differing total energetic contents -
- though with the two bearing the exact same overall complexity

--- that ---

evolution favours structures of increased complexity density - the equivalent idea of evolution towards more efficient space-filling properties -

- of efficient complexity -

- the goal (through the eyes of energetic re-arrangement -
of evolution) is Quality and not Quantity.

Note:
The mind is of greater complexity than the Universe -
raising an interesting question
- from which

The Universe in a single atom (Dalai Lama)
The Universe in a nutshell (Stephen Hawking)

neatly come to our rescue.

The repeating pattern of evolution -
occurring within different juxtaposed, sequential abstraction layers.