The Divided House of Faith and Reason

[Weir]

Hi Steve and SB_UK,

To the question Why Anything? We must accept on blind faith that we are here or else consign ourselves to a mental institution. The question asks what determines meaning. When we seek meaning we seek to integrate diverse elements of phenomenal experience. We do this from the crib, from simple motions to crawling to standing to walking to associated words etc. etc. until we integrate fluent behaviour and thought.

Language gives us the ability to deal with experience in abstraction. This brings linear logical processes that link things up in a flow through the assumed space and time of our environment. But this left brain - right brain bifurcation also opens our right brain intuitive perceptions to a march down a road to death. This opens an urgent intuitive quest for integrating meaning that transcends our own birth and death. We need a holistic framework of intuitive understanding in order to integrate meaning and this ultimately relates to the entire universe. We are destined to be cosmic beings and we seek to know the universal source in order to transcend the whole of space and time that consigns us to a march toward oblivion.

Science does this objectively as a Big Bang but in so doing consigns the entire universe to an ultimate meaningless oblivion when all the galaxies and stars expand and die or else face another equally devastating hypothetical crunch, neither of which can ever be confirmed in experience.

Religions are born by teachers that claim profound intuitive insights into the nature of universal being (God, Allah, the Dharma, the Tao) that transcend the grave, but their social manifestations tend to get ossified into rigid interpretations in left brain language that turns them into their own caricatures. The intuitive quest that is the essence of faith gets too often translated as “It’s in the book!” Full stop!

But we intuitively know that there must be something more to it all. Science and religion should not be at odds. Even a blind belief in personal psychic annihilation at death requires the transcending belief that this is true for all creatures everywhere in the entire universe for all time. This too is a contradiction in terms because it is an unfounded belief that transcends ones personal birth and death. Neither can we believe that we are a unique universal being in and for ourselves for we would isolate ourselves from all phenomenal experience which also amounts to psychic annihilation. There must be a transcending intelligent relationship between the particular and the universal as prescribed by System 2.

Then the quest is to know the universal in personal phenomenal experience and thus transcend the whole of space and time even while remaining a living participant. The universal System 1 is the living manifestation of universal values, (truth, unity, love, compassion, mercy, justice, harmony, etc.), that transcend and subsume the entire creative process. It can only be known directly from the subsumed perspective of System 2. This universal truth can not be a static dead affair reduced to language. It must be realized in personal experience. The cosmic order seeks to know itself in order to transcend itself as the source of all creation. That realization is not a thing that can ever die.

Regards,
Weir

[Weir]

Hi Steve and SB_UK,

Personally I do not think it is fruitful to build abstract models of creation using phenomena and/or language derived from creation. All possible structural varieties of phenomenal experience with respect to inside and outside can be delineated without doing this, but this “System” alone is also not enough. These structural dynamics must be related to primary elements of phenomenal experience that we can confirm directly in empirical experience of some kind. Otherwise we are just talking hypothetically in circles for ever without any meaningful outcome. There are endless possible hypothetical interpretations of this kind possible.

The primary element of this physical creation that we see around us is the hydrogen atom which consists of one proton with one electron moving around it in a specific photonic energy shell. There is a huge body of empirical evidence to justify this basic model of a primary atom. Initially the evidence was accumulated from the spectral lines of hydrogen which are defined by light energy emitted from excited hydrogen atoms. Each time an electron receives a specific quantized amount of photon energy it jumps to a higher orbit. When it falls back to a lower energy level it emits the same quantized amount of photon energy that has a characteristic frequency and wavelength. This radiated energy constitutes a series of specific spectral lines depending on the orbits jumped.

When the electron moves from orbit to orbit it CAN NOT traverse the space between them. It disappears in one orbit and spontaneously appears in another. It is said that it makes a quantum jump. There is every reason to believe that the whole atom disappears and recurs synchronously with all atoms everywhere. All of the empirical evidence points to this sole interpretation. Quantum correlation observed between subatomic particles separated at great distances compared to a single atom requires that they are universally and synchronously linked.

Motion of a single electron around a single proton can only be confirmed with respect to an external frame of reference which is provided in quantum mechanical experiments by a magnetic field. The internal motion is also implicitly related to the synchronous projection of other external atoms that can have any random orientation in space but nevertheless provide an external frame of reference.

The empirical evidence demands that the angular momentum of the electron around the proton in the first energy shell of an atom MUST be zero. If it is moving at all then it MUST make the equivalent of one complete revolution each time the whole atom vanishes as an element of timeless quantum energy in the Void and recurs again as a whole atom. The electron must recur in the same place. It must do this to satisfy known requirements of the Coulomb force of attraction between proton and electron. The radius of the orbit is known accordingly and the distance the electron travels in each quantum jumps can therefore be known. The so-called velocity of the electron can also be known accordingly, even though the electron does not move through continuous space time but only in a series of quantum jumps in each successive synchronous frame. From this primary information the Primary Interval of Time can be accurately calculated. This interval is indeed primary. There is no other that can be substantiated by basic empirical evidence.

In higher orbits the electron moves in quantum jumps around the orbit. This requires a discrete whole number of jumps in each orbit since there is no such a thing as half a jump. Louis de Broglie developed his wave equation of matter using Conjugate Identities such a way that it fits a discrete whole number of wavelengths around each orbit. Each wave length thus equates to each relative quantum jump in position with respect to the synchronous projection of all atoms everywhere. Each orbit thus corresponds to a fixed photon energy shell of a specific quantum amount.

All electromagnetic energy in the universe is released from atomic processes in some way. Most of it comes from atomic fusion processes in suns where mass is converted to EM radiation. In other words, electromagnetic energy is matter in reflux through the cosmic movie. It has a reciprocal relationship to atomic matter.

I hope this helps. There is more at www.cosmic-mindreach.com but the website builder unfortunately does not allow mathematical formulae. Keep in mind that mathematics derives from how the cosmic order works, not vice versa. There is no mathematician out there in space calculating the orbs within orbs.

As for us we are evolved organized energy patterns clothed in atoms. Atoms can not organize themselves into living forms without an energy pattern to direct them.

Regards
Weir

PS: There is no universal metric out there apart from atoms and light.

[Weir]

Some additional notes on cosmology may be in order.

When Einstein published general relativity it was thought that our Milky Way galaxy constituted the whole universe. Then when Edwin Hubble began using a big new telescope he saw what appeared to be stars, and some star clusters and nebulae in our galaxy that were in fact distant galaxies. He also saw that the further away they appeared to be the more the distinct spectral lines of elements such as hydrogen were shifted or moved towards the red end of the spectrum. This red shift became the basis of an expanding universe that by extrapolation backwards in the spacetime continuum of general relativity became the Big Bang hypothesis. The whole of spacetime and all matter embedded within it in the entire universe was believed to have come from a singularity, that is, from an infinitesimal volume of spacetime infinitely smaller than a single proton.

That is a lot to swallow. It is founded on the red shift. In a discontinuous universe an alternate explanation for the red shift and background radiation presents itself. Einstein repeatedly pointed out that general relativity was founded on a spacetime continuum with embedded mass smoothed out so that it could be treated as a gas. Singularities of infinite mass could not apply and had to be cut out. But that does not stop the computers from churning over.

In a discontinuous universe a different scenario necessarily presents itself. Space and time are themselves contracted through atomic fusion processes in the centers of stars that synthesize the elements up to iron, and the heavier elements are synthesized by super novae explosions that provide the energy needed to fuse heavier elements. So stars have various space-time densities depending upon their type and age.

The peripheral rotation of galaxies also introduces external space-frame skipping at their centers with respect to the peripheries. Galaxies consequently have a curved space-time profile. This requires that stars that contract space-time will tend to seek a consistent external space time somewhere in the galactic profile. They will migrate outwards when they are young with a large supply of hydrogen and migrate back toward the center with most of their hydrogen converted to heavier elements.

X-ray and infrared telescopes have provided direct evidence of this. Old stars are densely accumulated near the center with stars being accelerated into an accretion dick that surrounds a black hole at the center. There are also periodic ejections over many tens of millions of years of primary hydrogen moving radially outward into the disk with hot young star formation in these giant clouds. This indicates that galaxies are cells creatively regenerating their own stellar populations. There is a website article on Cosmology at www.cosmic-mindreach.com that develops this scenario.

Sir Fred Hoyle was instrumental in the initial development of astrophysics and his objections to the Big Bang are legendary. His steady state theories were unfortunately harnessed to general relativity and the spacetime continuum. He also took up the Pan-spermia Theory first proposed by a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry named Svante Arrhenius in a book published 1907. The theory, as further developed by Holye and Wickramasinghe, proposes that there is an interstellar gene pool. Bacteria spores and perhaps yeast spores can survive the rigors of space indefinitely. They can be picked up by comets and taken to the inner solar system where they are small enough to ride outward on the radiation pressure of star light. In this way they can have a soft landing on planets with a suitable atmosphere and seed the origins of organic evolution. There is no need to explain how the incredibly complex first cell happened to be created. As life evolved on the planet it was also heavily impacted by asteroids the first couple billion years with ejecta that could reseed the interstellar gene pool.

So there is no reason to believe that the universe does not go on eternally according to how the cosmic order works. There is specific evidence to indicate this.

[austintorn@aol.com]

The System

(Thanks, Weir)

[austintorn@aol.com]

The Seed of Life

Mikey was a unicellular microorganism, a microbe, one of the bacteria that were called ‘extremopiles’, for they were capable of living in extreme environmental conditions of temperature, pH, salinity, pressure, dryness, radiation, and even with no sunlight or oxygen. They even loved chomping on plutonium, the deadliest substance ever known. Mikey’s ancestry went back 4 billion years, he being among the sturdiest creatures on Earth, those that had also become its master, for humans couldn’t live for but a few minutes without bacteria.

Mikey thought that he might go to Enceladus for a balmy vacation where life was easy but always with a pool and party not too far away. Enceladus is a small satellite of Saturn and is a geologically active moon world with some wondrous scenery of spouting volcanic plumes, perhaps even having a bath of water within and below.

Just about then, for sometimes wishes do come true, a huge meteor impact struck the Earth and thrust some material into space, including Mikey and friends, who then resided rather dormant in a rock that protected them by acting as a shield against solar radiation and cosmic rays, not that this would have bothered them a whole lot. Eons later Mikey and friends and their rock of a spaceship landed on Enceladus.

Mikey stepped out of the rock and onto a tiger-striped surface where the temperature was about -359 degrees F. A tiny shiver almost began to undulate through him, but he shrugged it off. He was hungry, though, not having eaten for millions of years, except for a few bites of iron—and so he was really only running quickly at about half-speed. His friends followed excitedly, covering over 100 kilometers in a few minutes. They paused every so often to gobble up some dust.

They were taken aback for a millisecond when they spotted a fast food restaurant with a sign that said ‘billions and billions of bacteria served here’.

“Hey, there is native life here, just as we’d hoped” said Mikey. “What a tropical paradise! Hey, there are some hot springs. Let’s take a dip with the sexy native girls and then kick back and relax.”

They frolicked and swam all around for a few thousand years… until a very large eruption sent them all far into space. After a billion years or so, they landed on the 4th planet from a sun in a solar system far away, seeding it with life that became human-like within a few more billion years, although their were some minor differences in anatomy.

Mikey,

See my picture below:
.

[SteveA]

Third or Fourth attempt at a post below - please ignore though -

Instead -

----------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------------------------------------
::Question::
Using your imagination describe whatever anything you can not possibly even ever even imagine yourself coming up with a plausible solution for -
----------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------------------------------------

The only axiom which I think we need is -
which we can't delve any deeper into solving
is

'how come (the mechanism) anything (came about) ?'

forget our Universe for this question -
- the scope is just plain anything.
Grasping 'NO-thing' is difficult -
grasping 'the first SOME-thing' is in a different league -
and after 5 minutes -
- is making me feel like throwing up.

I cannot imagine 'how that first any which something arose'.

There's real power in phrasing this question
- and although every other aspect of our reality can be made to make sense
- the fact that this very real concern -
will always be unanswerable -
places everything post-'something' as being (of necessity) grounded in faith.

I'd agree that it appears once you can have something - anything - it doesn't appear hard for there to also be the rest and also there never needed to be a first thing with an assumption of nothingness before - that could easily be a perspective that arises from a disconnection of memories (similar to my comments that all dimensions in a space are connected to a common origin and can't be perfectly orthogonal to each other, otherwise they wouldn't appear connected) as memories accumulated in one context could be uncomparable or irrelevant to memories from another context (though personally I assume the universe maintains the equivalent of a record or memory of its history as influences dissipate away from their origin but don't appear to ever vanish. The relationships simply transform).

I also admit that there doesn't appear to be any certain cause or origin from my perspective, though everything I know has to be a part of my experiences and that can put a limit on knowledge - there are experiences and then there's knowledge regarding them and it appears even logical that there can exist experiences that can't be described or known - just like in my alphabet version, the first time a new letter is encountered it can possess distinct subjective qualities, but it doesn't have any other relationship to anything in past except that it happens to be what exists now. So from that perspective, I can understand it (it wouldn't be much unlike the "first" event, it's just the current revision of the "first" event, except it happens to be attached to memories of prior events - and relationships built upon it could be unrelated or "orthogonal" to other objects constructed/existing in memory - an interesting thought - you could have things similar to an infinite sequence of "Big Bangs" or universes potentially tied together sequentially in a single dimension because they only share a single process/attribute in common, but navigation could be a pain without better landmarks, which leads to some other ideas ... but I'll stop there because it's too easy for me to type run on paragraphs like this! ).

The point I was swerving around is that if an original cause of something is unknown or "random" then that doesn't inherently deny a wide range of possible explainations, each as potentially subjectively valid as another (ok, I don't actually mean that - some esoteric ideas don't appear deserving of a second consideration, but there are still a possibly unlimited number of potential causes that may be true).

I guess in many ways there's nothing very important to specifying a cause behind a first anything - it's history, but any deterministic system of logic describes cause and effect chains that connect it to the future with various expectations, possibilities and emotional values. In that sense, my symbolic representations don't fit, because they're interchangeable and not specific subjective qualities that aren't easily swapped in terms of motivation or preferrences - ABC might simply be "better" than CBA to someone for whatever reason and there's a motivation in knowing how to experience one versus the other and though time/learning/growth may present an unknown, if the cause of the time/learning/growth is known then this could influence decisions made.

To put it simpler - if everything was random, there would be no purpose in trying to build any knowledge or retain any motivation to select or prefer anything specific, but that's a bit hard to digest and actually though there may be something that's truly random 1) it doesn't appear that all the results are in yet 2) it may be that an idealized randomness is something impossible (I posted a comment on this earlier - there are typically many expectations of the properties that randomness represents and it could be that there is nothing that can simultaineously meet all those expectations - so some component of randomness could be paradoxically required to not be random, at least for some idealized form of random) 3) if it's truly random and could be anything then non-random descriptions could also fit the bill for the specifics, at least over some finite period of time - in other words, I don't believe there's actually a way to prove something is fundamentally random, because something that's random is not constrained to only being a specific thing or sequence that disagrees with a non-random description and the non-random description would be preferable, if it appears to agree, because it gives some additional information. Then again, I'd prefer logical reasons as to why something must be a specific way as to taking a few physical samples and deciding it appears to be something so #3 may not end up being very satisfactory.

[SteveA]

The all important idea here though is that the fundamental layer of faith which anchors us (mind) into reality -
is the only axiom or unknowable which we need harbour -
- thereafter we can fold all other aspects of our reality into sense.

It sounds good, but I still can't help thinking there's some way to bridge the infinitesimal gap without needing to make a leap of faith (and maybe I'm still having too much fun trying to fit all the pieces, but I admit that there are some that appear not just difficult to fit but impossible because they figuratively don't even have any edges - but I guess it's alrady implicit that I do have some faith that there exists a coherent larger picture otherwise I wouldn't be trying to put them together ).

Thinking about a vaguely viable origin to 'anything particularly' hurts one's head -
- the problem just keeps on being pushed further and further back -
not solved -
- just pushed further into the distance
- never solved.

I think I can already see what the next question would be - assuming a ToE was nailed down, then there'd be stage 2 ... why the specifics of the here and now? (In some ways the specifics don't appear too important though and maybe knowing any one of 1) where you've been 2) where you are or 3) where you're going, might be enough to make the other two unimportant.

------------- IGNORE (the route to the post above) -------------

Looking at processes which occur within our Universe -
and then within our Universe - within our mind -
ever'ything' appears to makes sense bar -

why any energy?

Yes, energy's a good one - this might be a poor analogy but everything appears part of the energy food chain and motivated by it.

If we can accept the following simple

---------------------------------------------------------
- energy -
representing at its simplest level -
some direction of motion ->
---------------------------------------------------------

That's rather synonymous with my view of time as information (energy) conveying a perception of change (motion).

Motion is relative to an origin. Change is relative to memory.

Energy is conserved. Information is irreducible (that's not 100% true as the redundancy of information is observer dependent as defined by memories, just as the energy of a photon is relative to the position and velocity of an observer).

{later generating <- NOT some direction of motion}
- to then generate a 1d vector (an effectively 'ABSOLUTE' scaffold)

It could be that it's absolute from the perspective that a point is about as close to nothing (in one sense) as we can get (though a point in itself need not be specifically anywhere and could exist as anything - points in a space are generally considered to reside at a specific location within that space relative to an origin. For that form of point, it's not really accurate to describe it as zero dimensional or infinitesimal etc. because it exists at a precise location within a space and inherits precise values relative to each dimension and is a unit wide in each dimension). A true point that had no information attached to it is potentially anything, but it's not specific so it's a variable that just describes an unknown thing.

When we hit 1 dimension, with an implicit origin, then we "collapse" this superposition of all things as a single unknown thing and instead replace it with a specific view of each thing relative to the perspective described by the original process constructing the dimension - there may be a way to remove a requirement for an origin and have the dimension exist as symmetrically infinite in both directions, but I don't think that gains anything.

The only way to break out of a single dimension of evolution over time is to have some degree of freedom outside the system (which potentially leads to a paradox if that's also part of another deterministic system as it's still 1-D from a larger perspective - so a second dimension could be seen as describing the indeterminacies of outside influences - you have a single 1-D evolution for every possible hidden variable and so you have the equivalent of a 2 dimensional evolution of all deterministic systems, but for discrete things we can still arrange a 2-D plane, or any higher dimensional form into a line by zigzagging along the diagonals - then again, if there were objects for which there was no way to logically make a selection between them and order them in a specific way, this would split off into different possibilities and not be 1 dimensional - so what objects appear identical to a deterministic system no matter how much information it has regarding them?).

[SteveA]

Now that's how a decent ToE should look

[SteveA]

...
Old stars are densely accumulated near the center with stars being accelerated into an accretion dick that surrounds a black hole at the center. There are also periodic ejections over many tens of millions of years of primary hydrogen moving radially outward into the disk with hot young star formation in these...

Did I catch a Freudian slip in there ? It sounds like Hollywood!

[Weir]

Did I catch a Freudian slip in there ? It sounds like Hollywood!

Thanks for pointing that out Steve. Funny! Maybe I should have you edit all my posts.

Regards,
Weir