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The Nature of Time Essay Contest (2008)
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The Physical Nature Of Time by Paul N Butler
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Paul N Butler wrote on Sep. 30, 2008 @ 08:36 GMT
Essay AbstractOur sense of time is due to the interaction of two systems. The first is the basic structure of the universe that we live in and the other is the way our minds work. It is how our minds interact with and react to the inputs received from certain parts of the physical world that gives us our sense of time. It would not be possible to adequately cover both parts of the subject in this paper due to space limitations, so it will mostly be limited to the aspects of the physical world that tend to generate in us our sense of the meaning of time.
Author BioWorked in IT for over 30 years. Currently retired. Have always been interested in understanding how the world works and would like to share with others some of the things that I have discovered over the years.
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John Merryman wrote on Nov. 2, 2008 @ 16:36 GMT
As I've described my view of time, it's that there is only this field of radiation energy and structure tends to condense out of it, like dew out of fog, because the energy isn't stable. In fact equilibrium is a state of order and isn't stable. So we have this universe of expanding radiant energy, interspersed with gravitational vortices. These collapse to the point they ignite, either from chemical reaction or pressure and radiate the energy back out as more expanding energy. This is a perpetual cycle, since the equilibrium isn't stable.
So the past is effectively that dimensional structure we view as reality, yet by the point we perceive it, is only collapsing information of past events. The (chemical) interaction and pressure created by this collapsing past radiates back out and informs the field of energy and thus directs how future structure is defined, thus creating the future. In a sense then, the unstable equilibrium is what we might define as the present. This isn't as clearly argued as I would like, but i hope you get the idea. It ties into the bottom up chaos/energy/process vs. top down order/structure of Complexity Theory, with collapsing structure as top down order, future to past direction of events and radiating energy as bottom up process, past to future direction of the energy manifesting those events.
Now to get to the point I've been mulling over. Part of my initial interest in understanding time has been an effect I could conjure up on occasion of predicting events if I just completely zone out. Being a rational sort, I needed an explanation. The event which describes my thinking was the tsunami that struck south Asia some years ago. Prior to its arrival, the water receded considerably and all the animals started acting disturbed. Given the wave nature of reality, we perceive only the present, yet it is like a cresting wave. Since our perspective is inherently subjective, we don't sense that drawing back, or vacuum which proceeds the arrival of the body of the wave. Yet for those beings most imbedded in their larger context and not self absorbed, this vacuum is as real as the wave itself.
Now since our brains function as electro-static fields, I think we have the ability to transmit our thought patterns to others, just as a radio transmitter is picked up by a receiver. For reasons of survival, because our world isn't very benign, we have also learned to mute our projection of thoughts so that others can't sense what we are thinking. (Suffice to say, I grew up as a younger child in a large, competitive family and this was apparent to me long before convention taught me it was taboo.)
Which is to say that these waves take many forms, across many spectrums, not just visible light and auditory. Since I've spent my life working with racehorses, I've had to develop these senses out of professional necessity.
Paul N. Butler wrote on Nov. 11, 2008 @ 11:01 GMT
John Merryman;
When looking at a theory, it is helpful to first see what class it fits into.
There are four main classes of theories. The first and highest class is composed of those theories that are derived directly from interaction with the real world. This class is the most likely to be valid because it is based on real world observations and tests that are usually repeatable. ...
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John Merryman;
When looking at a theory, it is helpful to first see what class it fits into.
There are four main classes of theories. The first and highest class is composed of those theories that are derived directly from interaction with the real world. This class is the most likely to be valid because it is based on real world observations and tests that are usually repeatable. As an example, if you put an alternating electrical current through a wire and then position another wire that is connected to an ammeter at various angles and distances from the first wire you can determine the angle that causes the maximum current to be generated in the second wire and how that generated current varies with the distance between the wires. This experiment can be done in many different ways and it will always yield the same result that the current varies with the square of the distance. A theory that explains how and why the world works this way and is directly derived from this and other real world observations is more likely to be true than a theory from one of the other classes because it starts with the real world and builds directly on what we actually see in the world. The most surely established and useful theories are usually from this class. The second class of theories are those that come from visualizations in a person’s mind that normally start with combining information derived from observed scientific laws and facts and then attempts to extrapolate more details by using visual thought experiments. This is the second most likely type of theory to yield valid results. Einstein’s theory of relativity is in this class. The third theory class uses primarily abstract language structures such as the English language. It uses language constructs like rules of logic and often uses new terms to describe things and concepts that are not observed and may not even be able to be observed in theory. These types of theories are often not connected greatly to the real life observable world and are, therefore less likely to be true representations of the real world than the first two classes. The fourth and lowest class of theories is those that are derived mostly from second level abstract language structures such as abstract mathematics. It is very easy in this type of theory to lose one’s connection to reality. Often the math leads to new constant and variable quantities that are not tied to anything in reality. As the math gets more complicated and separated from reality, one can get lost in a maze of a large number of possible values for a large number of variables that are not understood which seems to allow you to generate many different types of worlds by choosing different variable values, but there is no way to separate out the right set of variable values that truly represents the real world or to even know if any of the multitude of possible combinations is valid. A theory that generates too many possible worlds (without generating a path to the real one) is of vary little value. Of course, many theories contain some aspects of more than one of the above types, but usually one is predominate and is the basis of the theory.
To get a better understanding of your concepts let’s start at the beginning of your comment here. First you talk about a field of radiation energy. Is this field made of photons of electromagnetic energy and if not what is it composed of and how is it generated or if it always existed what is its detailed nature? As an example does it exist in a dimensional system or does the dimensional system come from it and how if it does? What are the structures that condense out of it? Are the structures the gravitational vortices and if so do they represent or generate entities in the real world such as matter particles or energy photons, etc. How does the collapse of the vortices affect our real world (what do we see when one collapses? In short, how do all these things describe or generate the things that we see in reality in the world? The idea that equilibrium is not stable does not seem to be true in all cases in the real world. To give some examples, on the physical level a pencil balanced on the point of another pencil would not generally be very stable and any force applied to the pencil would likely cause it to fall off of the other pencil, but if you cut a hollow sphere in half and balance it on the tip of a pencil it can be very stable if the tip of the pencil is located at the central point inside the half-sphere. In this case if you apply momentary pressure to the half sphere, it would move off of its equilibrium point, but it would ultimately come to rest at that point again once friction dissipated the applied energy. On the chemical level, if you put a drop of ink into a glass of water, the ink molecules will be dispersed until they are equally distributed in all locations in the water and will tend to stay in that very stable state of equilibrium. Even on the atomic level a gas composed of hydrogen atoms in a container will distribute itself so that the atoms are equally distributed in all areas of the container to create a stable equilibrium. Of course, I may be misunderstanding your use of the term equilibrium. If so, what do you mean by it?
It is true that events that we see (such as a bat hitting a baseball) are not actually seen and perceived by us exactly when they occur because they are transmitted to us by photons, etc. that have a finite motion amplitude and once they reach our sense receptors the interactions that they generate and the further reactions in us that allow us to recognize and understand the event require other finite motions to occur. By the time we recognize that the ball has been hit by the bat, the bat may have recoiled backward some small distance or at least slowed down some and the ball’s motion may have reversed direction. I do not see that there is such a thing as a collapsing past. There is just a continuum of motions and their interactions. The past does not really exist except for in the records of motions and their interactions that are stored in our minds. When the bat hits the ball, the event just causes some changes in certain motions in the continuum of motions that make up all motions as they were before the event. The motions continue on from the event in their new changed form so there is nothing left behind to collapse. Any changes in the information of the motions involved, such as a different direction or motion amplitude, are the result of new combinations of the information elements that the motions contained before the interaction. The total information content and motion content of the overall system remains the same. As an example, one particle of matter may receive an increase in its motion amplitude due to an interaction with another particle, but the other particle’s total motion content will be reduced by the same amount. From the information standpoint, the motion amplitude information stored in one particle will contain a higher motion amplitude value than it did before the interaction while the other particle’s motion amplitude stored value will be reduced by the same amount of change. This allows both total motion and information to be conserved in the event. The future does not really exist either. It is just the result of the continuation of motions and interactions from their present conditions. It does not need to be informed of what to do next because each entity’s current motions already contain within themselves the position, motion amplitude, direction, etc. information that is needed to generate their next position, motion amplitude, direction, etc. and if the next position causes the particle to interact with another particle, the information elements of the two particles are combined dynamically in such a way that the overall information and motion quantities are conserved. Maybe you can give me a little more detail about the top down and bottom up theories that you mention as to how they work and how they apply in your theory.
It certainly could be that if you spent much time at the beach and got used to the normal tides etc., you might either consciously or subconsciously sense and come to understand that the receding of the water level from its normal value that would be expected by the current tide conditions etc. might mean that a tidal wave was approaching or possibly you might just get a feeling that something was not right, but not know exactly what was wrong. We can all predict the future in this way to one degree or another. It would be possible for about anyone who stood at a bus stop and saw the bus approaching and slowing down as it approached the bus stop to predict that in the future the bus would stop at the corner. Some present observable data is just less obvious than other data making it harder to see the total motion patterns involved and, therefore, making accurate predictions from the data more difficult.
It is possible with the use of advanced fifth vector structuring technology to observe and analyze structures at the atomic and even particle levels and to connect to such structures in the brain to tap into another person’s senses or even thoughts, generally without the other person knowing it. It is also possible to transfer thoughts and images etc. to others in the same way. This is, however, way beyond the present technology of man in this world and will likely remain so for hundreds of years. That is all I will talk about that at this time. As far as your theory is concerned it could be tested by studying a child that had been isolated from other people and could not have learned to not use such an ability. If his thoughts were naturally projected to others they should be able to be detected by others around him. Of course if you believe in God, it would be easy to see that he would have such abilities to give you information or even remove it at any time.
I guess you could experiment and see if you find any such method of natural thought transfer. My guess is that it has already been tried and I have not heard about anyone in this world having success at finding any such waves etc. that are generated naturally in the brain and are emitted strongly enough that they could carry thoughts to others or any natural mechanisms in people’s brains to receive such waves etc. that carry thoughts. People can generally analyze their stored records of past motion conditions along with the current conditions and then extrapolate the patterns found to predict future conditions with some level of accuracy, which will vary depending on such variables as how many records containing useful data are present and how widely do the records cover all the variables (otherwise your experience level with that type of data). This is generally called intuition. If you have any such validated information, however I would be interested in seeing it.
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John Merryman wrote on Nov. 13, 2008 @ 04:47 GMT
Paul,
Thank you for taking the time to respond in such a thoughtful and detailed manner. Hopefully my response is at least half as clear.
In my own submission, I tried to remain fully in the first category of theory, subsequent discussion of how such a basic perspective might interact with other's observations about the subject and how it interfaces with a complex reality does lead...
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Paul,
Thank you for taking the time to respond in such a thoughtful and detailed manner. Hopefully my response is at least half as clear.
In my own submission, I tried to remain fully in the first category of theory, subsequent discussion of how such a basic perspective might interact with other's observations about the subject and how it interfaces with a complex reality does lead one off the deep end into more speculative concepts.
The "field of energy" is a good example. In other posts I've proposed that light expands as what might be thought of as a wave, but not one traveling through a medium. Rather an expanding sphere of analog energy from its source, as opposed to quantities of photon particles. The spectrum and any pulses are caused by emission, rather than interaction with a medium and it would only be in contact with anything sufficient to interfere does it quantize into particles. Obviously this is highly speculative and not fundamental to my description of time. That said, it does explain how light can travel such enormous distances and still remain so clear. It would also possibly explain how this light is redshifted, since a wave would have to fill compounding volume the greater its radius. So "tired light" would not be caused by interference of photon particles, since they only form on reception and remain constant in energy, but reduced in number, due to the properties of how light interacts. This interface of light as an energetic expansion and collapsing into quanta would also signal the transition between pure energy and the initial state of mass. All speculation on my part and any rebuttal or clarification is welcome.
Dimensions are a conceptual description of this energy and the space it occupies, since three dimension space is the coordinate system based on an arbitrary center point, of which there could be any number. As we exist as the center point of our individual realities. The projection of time as a fourth linear dimension is an intuitive construct, aka, narrative. That is why we view it as a fundamental dimension which proceeds from past events to future ones, when the logical conclusion is that these events are effect, not cause and as each is replaced by the next, go from future potential to past circumstance.
Structure would be the inter-relationship between gravitational collapse and energetic expansion. This provides the matrix of spin that is the basis of mass. If gravity has the advantage, it is contracting the energy contained within the structure. When expansion prevails, it radiates energy away. While this is speculation on my part, I do think it approximates a rough draft of what we observe. I should note that I don't agree with the Big Bang model of the universe and that redshift is cause by the above mentioned process of expanding waves. The resulting redshift causes a horizon line for visible light, though black body radiation travels across it. What we have than, is a vacuum populated by any number of gravitational vortices, i.e.. galaxies and galaxy structures, to atomic structure, that are both drawing energy in, both with the potential to radiate it back out. I put it this way because of the discontinuous/continuous, digital/analog dichotomy is a function of this, with expanding energy representing the continuous and collapsing mass delineating the discontinuous. This ties back into my proposition about time, in which energy is constantly expanding into the future and leaving the past, while structure is first in the future, carried along in the present for as long as the energy manifests it, then is deposited in the past, when all energy is removed. Since three dimensional space is essentially a description of structure, that is why I'm saying it collapses, relative to the energy, as the energy expands relative to it.
Your examples of equilibrium all represent a balance of elements. What I'm proposing is that since I view space as infinite, then the energy/mass occupying it isn't stable at a completely uniform state, which would probably be only a few degrees over the present measured cosmic background radiation. The even level of this radiation, at 2.7k, would be the equilibrium state, over which a phase transition occurs and it is unstable and starts to quantize when not in sufficient motion. Like a stopped bicycle, it falls over and starts to collapse. This provides a far simpler explanation for the CMBR and its energy level than Inflation Theory. In the other end of the scale, Black Holes are not holes in spacetime, but vortices in which most energy is radiated back out before reaching the event horizon and that which does fall in is ejected as jets out the poles.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, geometry mistakes the center point for zero, yet 1+(-1) equals nothing, as in blank space, not a centerpoint between them. So zero should be the empty page, not a point at the center of it. In cosmology this would be a vacuum, not a singularity.
As for the speculation about how the future might impinge on the present and other comments on reading minds, I would start by saying I've spent my life working with and riding horses, race horses specifically. So I do have the impression animals have it over us when it comes to living in the present. As well as the fact that their sensory abilities are at the very least, different from ours. So I've spent a great deal of time considering the issue. When I'm thinking of reading other's mind, it isn't on the human level of calculation and introspection, but on a far more basic level of intent projection. This ability has carried over into a surface reading of others. For me, the situation where this is most apparent with people is driving on the road. By and large they are projecting their awareness onto the situation ahead of them and I tend to sense it. It can be it any number of ways. One of the more obvious are those little spots in my vision, as well as waves and clumps of spots, depending on how much they are focused, vs. distracted. Also I get flashes of emotion and occasionally a strange word or phrase. Since I have consciously studied this level of my personal interaction with my environment, it isn't something I'm imagining, since it is often a distraction and so I try to shut it out. Having grown up as a younger child in a large family, I had to develop a strong understanding of my own space and bubble at a very early age. I remember as a child, laying on the porch, watching an ant, when it stopped and this tiny cone of awareness started having around with its antennae. As for whether anyone else has experienced this before, in school there was a certain redheaded Irish girl who was a bit of trouble and I had trouble getting her out of my mind. One day it seemed there was one of those spots in my vision and it glowed slightly red. There was a line running through/across it, drawing it toward me. The result was a classic Valentine heart. So it is my impression that as we have grown more complex, we have lost a lot of old knowledge. As you point out, the information content remains the same, so all this new information must have displaced more then we appreciate. Remember, it's the energy which goes from past to future and it's the information which goes from future to past.
Regards,
John
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John Merryman wrote on Nov. 13, 2008 @ 04:59 GMT
Sorry for some of the grammatical errors, its late. (That's "waving", not "having," in the story of the ant.
Narendra Nath wrote on Nov. 17, 2008 @ 13:08 GMT
Dear Paul,
let me begin by offering you my apology for the critical comment on very legthy postings not only by you but a few others too. it is just my personal opinion which can easily ignore. You will grant me my independence when i submit the following points in support of my view:-
1. During my education, i was told to respond to others specifically to the query being made. i also learnt that it is impolite to tell others what they are not keen to know, however profound your opinion may be, as per your judgement.
2. The interest of other is supreme in any dialogue between the two. If one is not seeking details from you, it is best to be brief. This helps the other understand/comprehend you better. It is for the other to seek specific details that are of interest.
3. Profoundness of one may just be routine for another. None of us are likely to have the same background knowledge.
4. Never tell any thing to the other unlesws he seeks it from you. Only the other knows what aspects/details he is interested in. Your opinion or interest in this regard is not important, howsoever significant you may consider the same.
Please ignore my observations if you don't care or like the same. i wish to remain friendly to you , as to all the other authors in this format. Good luck to you!
Paul N. Butler wrote on Nov. 19, 2008 @ 08:56 GMT
John;
In order to make any reasoned responses to your theory, I will need to ask many more questions to get further details of what you are proposing before I can give detailed analysis of it. I will try to look at it with the detail that you have given me, but my responses may change as I get a more complete idea of the details involved. I won’t get into the medium or no medium concept...
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John;
In order to make any reasoned responses to your theory, I will need to ask many more questions to get further details of what you are proposing before I can give detailed analysis of it. I will try to look at it with the detail that you have given me, but my responses may change as I get a more complete idea of the details involved. I won’t get into the medium or no medium concept now because it requires that other things of lesser degree be understood first and so it is a more advanced level than would be prudent to go into at this time. I assume from your comment that you believe that the energy travels through empty space, if that is wrong please clarify. My first question is, do you believe that this analog energy is composed of motion itself or do you believe that there must be something that is in existence that carries the motion through a distance in the empty space? How do you believe that the spectrum (Frequency/wavelength) are generated at emission (What is the mechanism or cause)? What is the cause or mechanism that generates photons from the analog wave when the wave comes into contact with anything sufficient to interfere with it? What is the effect on the wave front due to the photon generation process (does it get holes in it, a local or global decrease in energy (frequency) etc.) and if the wave front and the photons both travel at the speed of light, are the photons that are created in front of, behind, or embedded in the wave front after they are created? Once a photon is created, does it remain in existence and then travel away from its place of creation at the speed of light until it interacts with something or is its existence only a short-term transitional part of an interaction between the wave front and the interfering object that ends with the end of the interaction? It seems to me that light could travel either in the form of photons or such a wave and could still remain clear if space is mostly empty. On the other hand, I believe that it has been discovered that the light from a distant source can be partially or completely blocked or distorted by passing through dust clouds etc. I would find it even harder to believe that the red shift would be caused by the compounding volume filled by the wave because the wavelength of the wave proceeds from the direction of its source to the opposite direction (the direction that it is traveling into while the compounding volume of the wave front is at ninety degrees to that direction). As an example, if you generated a spherical wave that was only one wavelength thick and then you turned the generator off, the wave front produced would expand (at any point on its surface) in a direction that was at ninety degrees from the direction of the wave front’s travel, but the space inside of the sphere would consist of the one wavelength wave front envelope filled with empty space behind it. It is like blowing up a balloon. When you blow up the balloon, its skin does not get thicker, but is rather made thinner as it expands. You could possibly justify a belief from this that the wavelength of the expanding wave envelope would become shorter (blue shift) as the wave envelope is stretched, but not that it would get longer (red shift) (unless I am missing something in your thoughts about it). If the wave front continues to travel outward from its source at the speed of light, but its energy at any point on the wave front diminishes with the square of the distance traveled, the wave front’s energy cannot be stored in its three dimensional motion because it has remained the same. How do you believe it is stored? What are the properties of how light interacts (that you mentioned) in your theory? What is the pure energy composed of and how does it collapse into quanta? How is the energy stored in both cases and what is the difference between the two storage methods that causes it to be only analog in one case and only quantized in the other?
In your theory, what is your understanding of a dimension, what is its properties or information structure, and how do the dimensions interconnect and interact with each other to produce space, as we know it and the energy and matter etc. entities in it. In what form does the energy (and also matter particles) exist and how are their information structures stored (such as position, direction, and motion amplitude etc.)? How do energy waves and photons (and matter particles) interact with the dimensional structure? Are they all just three-dimensional entities or do they take part in other dimensions etc? I think that we mostly agree that time is not a physical dimension, but is the result of motions and their interactions. The future being composed of those motions/interactions that will interact with us, but have not done so yet (future potential), the present being those motions/interactions that are interacting with us now, and the past being the motions/interactions that were in our present, but no longer are interacting with us (past circumstance) and records of them have been stored in our minds. If I am wrong let me know.
Energy and gravity do often work in opposition to each other and that opposition can yield a stable equilibrium that is long lasting such as in the case of stars rotating around the centers of galaxies. This state of equilibrium of counterbalancing motions at all size levels allows for the existence of complex structures such as atoms and molecules etc. upon which our world is constructed (I realize that the strong and weak forces also play their parts in atoms etc., but like energy they are also due to motion transfers between entities that are a part of maintaining this equilibrium). Motion is the base of all entities whether they are energy entities, matter entities, or other types of entities. It is the combination of motions existing in and working through the structure of the dimensional system that generates all entities whether matter or energy and manifests to us our perception of and interaction with those entities, including those that are directly a part of us. All motions are basically the same. The only basic variables are a motion’s amplitude, the place in the dimensional system in which it exists, and its direction of travel in that place. Even at this most basic level of the construction of the entities that exist in our world, time is the relationship between the distances in the dimensional system and the motion amplitude of the motions that travel through those dimensional distances. There is no need for any motion to go into any future to prepare the future for the next change in motion etc. There is no such future structure to go to. Each motion contains within itself all the information necessary to generate its next position. Each motion contains within itself its current position or location in the dimensional structure and the direction it is traveling in that structure. It also contains the quantity of motion it possesses (motion amplitude). These three pieces of information are all that is needed to generate the motion’s next position in the dimensional distance through which it is traveling (its next present motion condition). This is why a motion always continues in the same direction at the same rate (motion amplitude) unless it is acted upon by (interacts with) another motion because all it knows is where it is at, what direction it is traveling in, and how fast it is going. When two motions interact, there is a sharing of this basic information between the two motions the result of which is a new modified information set in each motion that then determines each motion’s next present condition. It is not quite that simple because both energy and matter entities contain several motions in different dimensions within the dimensional system and any interaction can change the information set in any combination of those motions in each entity involved in the interaction. I am assuming that the energy waves in your theory do not interact directly with anything, but just generate photons that do the actual interacting. I see that you do have the understanding that mass effect is primarily the result of angular motion. This mass effect is primarily due to the angular components produced by the entity’s fourth dimensional motion (dynamic mass effect) in the case of an energy entity and in the case of a matter entity it is mainly due to the angular components produced by both the fourth and fifth dimensional motions (both dynamic and rest mass effects). Because gravity is connected to the mass effect it should be apparent that it is also connected to these angular motion components, but further information about that is at a more advanced level than that which is for general dissemination at this time. Sorry I should be getting more details about your theory so I can know how to properly introduce concepts in a way that will be more understandable. In your theory, how is the photon’s dynamic mass effect generated (it increases with the photon’s increase in frequency and decrease in wavelength)? What do you see as the cause of the locked relationship between frequency, wavelength, and dynamic mass effect in a given photon so that as frequency increases the mass effect also increases and the wavelength decreases and what causes a specific change in one term to always generate the same amount of variation in the other terms for all photons? What is the cause of the single motion amplitude structure of a photon and why is it the particular motion amplitude that we call the speed of light? Do you view a matter particle as a point particle and if so how can it have any angular motion to produce its mass effect? If a matter particle has size, do you view it as something like a small spinning solid ball or more like a point such as a photon traveling around an enclosed path? What causes a matter particle to have a frequency and wavelength effect similar to that of a photon? When you talk about the continuous/discontinuous, and digital/analog, I assume you are talking about the so called quantum nature of matter and energy photons as the digital and discontinuous while you view the energy waves as continuous and analog. Do you see anything that causes the quantum effects? If they seem to be the result of the structure of the universe, what in that structure causes them? To me all currently existing conditions of motions and their interactions, whether they are caused by energy or gravity are on the global level a part of the present. The motion conditions and their interactions that did exist have changed to generate the current motion conditions and their interactions and, therefore, no longer exist as they were in the past. The motion conditions and their interactions that do not yet exist, but will be generated by the current motion conditions and their interactions are in the future. All motion is basically the same whether directed inward by gravity or outward by energy. If you jump off of a chair and get pulled to the floor by gravity, that motion from the chair to the floor is in your future before you jump, in your present after you jump while you are falling to the floor, and in your past after you land on the floor and the motion has ended. If you use a lot of energy when you jump so that you first move upward against gravity that upward motion is also first in your future, then in your present, and lastly in your past. In the case of an expanding energy wave, all of its expansion that occurred before it reached its present expansion state is in the past, its current state of expansion is in the present, and expansion that occurs after its current state of expansion is in the future. This sounds like it is expanding into the future, but the actual expansion is always only in the present. Its current expanding motion conditions will generate its next immediate expanding motion conditions and those conditions will lead to the next conditions, but when they actually exist they are in the present. So, an expanding energy wave can have a part of its motion in the past, a part of its motion in the present, and a part of its motion in the future, but only the present really exists in reality. The same thing applies to a motion that is caused by the contraction of gravity as already covered in the jumping off of the chair example. In a sense all motions leave a past of past motion conditions that no longer exist behind them, exist in a present of present motion conditions, and move onward toward a future of future motion conditions, that never actually exist in that future because when those conditions are actually reached they are no longer in the future, but instead they are in the present. Part of the problem is that it is often stated that something is in the future or in the past as though the past and future are actual physical places where things are stored. In actual fact when we say that something is in the past we are really generally saying that it was in the present, but it no longer exists in the present in the same way as it did. When we say that something is in the future, we are saying generally that it does not exist in the present in a certain way, but that we have extrapolated the current motion conditions and their interactions out and have determined that when the current motion conditions and their interactions have changed through their normal motion progressions and interactions, it will then exist in the present in that way.
There is no real evidence that space is infinite, but there is probably no proof that it is not either. By a completely uniform state, are you talking about equal distribution of motion (energy and mass) throughout space, so that each cubic centimeter of space would have the same amount of matter and energy in it as every other cubic centimeter? Why do you believe such a condition would not be stable? Is there a reason that you picked 2.7k as the equilibrium point? What would cause this phase transition and how would it work? Why would it quantize (What is the mechanism that generates the quantization)?
In relation to what concepts is your reference to the 1+(-1) = nothing instead of 0? How is this concept applied to your theory?
Intents are generated in the spirit, which is not composed of matter and energy that is known to man at this time. The part of the soul that interfaces with the spirit is also not made of matter and energy that is known to man at this time. This subject is will beyond the level that can be released for local consumption at this time and likely for several hundred years into the future, so I can only give generalized answers to you about it. If you desire to study the greater meaning of the effects that you are experiencing, I would suggest the following (if you have already done some of these things you can ignore those things). First see a doctor to eliminate the possibility that any of the effects are caused by physical problems such as macular degeneration, etc. This may seem like I am trying to put it off as something else, but I am not. It is to establish a valid baseline for the next steps to assure validity of the study by allowing you to concentrate on the right set of effects. Next you will need someone that is not prejudiced either toward or against the concepts being studied that will be able to rightly examine the results that come from your experiment and tell it like it is and will be believable to others. Then you will need some test subjects that should vary from those that believe in the abilities that you mention to those that do not. You should not be allowed to know which ones believe and which ones do not believe. Situations can then be set up that have generally been the most conducive to your sensing abilities such as the car situation if that works best for you. The test subjects could be given specific things to concentrate on such as the left side of the road, the sky, the road itself, or on certain words or phrases to think about over and over in their mind. You should not be able to see the test subjects face to avoid visual cues. Any reflections of the test subject in the windows, etc. should also be eliminated from view. You should then write down what you see and otherwise sense that you believe is caused by the test subject’s concentration or thoughts etc. Several different tests should be done with each test subject with concentration on different things each time. You might even try to have the test subject try to not concentrate on anything as much is possible and still drive or to continually shift his concentration from one thing to another to see if that is detectable to you also. After the tests are all done, the data produced can be analyzed and you can know for sure what your abilities are and also get more insight as to how they work. You could then try different tactics to increase those abilities or make them more accurate. I suppose that if you could find that red headed girl she might make a good test subject or maybe even wife if you are not already married. I doubt that the ant would help much though.
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Paul N Butler wrote on Nov. 19, 2008 @ 09:06 GMT
Narendra,
Apology accepted. It would be good if you have not already done so to offer an apology to John Merryman on his paper’s space also because as I said his comments were not very long at all. Mine were actually long, but my main objection was the egoism part. I have found that in this world if one does not respond to such comments others generally assume they are true even...
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Narendra,
Apology accepted. It would be good if you have not already done so to offer an apology to John Merryman on his paper’s space also because as I said his comments were not very long at all. Mine were actually long, but my main objection was the egoism part. I have found that in this world if one does not respond to such comments others generally assume they are true even without evidence. It was not unexpected to receive such a comment though because in my research into man’s information structures I have found that if information is provided that is off by more than a few degrees of dispersion from the accepted main tunneling path (very different from what most people believe or are being told to believe) it is either ignored or if it is in some way viewed as a threat to mainstream positions it is attacked with the intent to marginalize it. Such attacks are not actually completely negative because it means that the provided information has been understood at least to the level that it is considered to be a threat by someone. The bad thing is that the combination of such defence mechanisms that are not based on the validity of the information, but only on a perceived threat against a part or all of another position in combination with man’s very narrow information acceptance dispersion angle means that in the future when large amounts of information must be provided to and understood by man in this world, it will need to be spoon-fed slowly by introducing small changes to existing positions and slowly moving in the desired direction in order to stay within the acceptable dispersion angle. This will greatly increase the time before the provided information will be useful to man. This means that in emergency situations direct intervention could be more likely needed, which is usually not desirable. The main other approach is to see if any individuals have a wide enough dispersion angle to allow for a local team to handle such emergencies. This has been a sci-fi moment provided to get your attention, at least as far as you know. Most of the information in it is true, however. I will now respond to your points.
1. If a person strictly adhered to the concept of only communicating with others in response to and completely in line with their questions, that person would never have the opportunity to introduce and promote any new concepts to others. I generally agree with not bothering to continue to give information to those that do not desire to know it (with some exceptions for the other person’s safety, etc.) The problem is that you generally do not know if information that you give to someone will be accepted or rejected until after it is given. In the case with Carlo, I gave information that was aimed at simplifying and advancing his work. I then waited to see if or how he would respond. When John Merryman responded to my comment to Carlo I gave him an answer and then referred him to my paper’s space for any further interaction. I believe this was a reasonable way to respond. Later when Carlo made his next comment and did not respond to me, I assumed that he was not keen as you would say to know the information that I could provide and so I would have left the situation as it was except for your comment, which I felt the need to respond to because of the negative content aimed at me and John Merryman.
2. I consider this point to be both true and unfortunate. It is true because of man’s very narrow information dispersion angle, which does not allow for the reception of very large amounts of information that is greatly different from what the person has experienced in the past. It is unfortunate because it means that new information cannot be presented in the way that would be the easiest to understand and would promote the most efficient transfer of information to the other person. On the Internet much time can be wasted in brief back and forth dialogue often with several days between responses only to find out after an extended time that the other person was not interested in the first place. If everyone always waited for others to ask for details that are of their interest, no new concepts would ever be shared because until you share at least some of the details about a new concept with someone he would not have any knowledge of the new concept and, therefore, would not be able to ask any questions about it.
3. That is true. A very good point.
4. This is generally a very bad way to go if you have some new concept that you are trying to share with others because the others would never seek it from you as they would not know of its existence or that you knew of it. Another problem with this concept is that we all need to know some things that we are not really interested in. Some children do not like to learn mathematics and would never seek knowledge of it from their teacher, but it is best for them to at least learn enough in that area to do the many things in daily life that require knowledge of it. If, for another example, you figured out that in fifty years there would be a great disaster that would cause the death of millions of people, but it could be prevented if you could teach certain concepts to people that would allow them to develop the needed technologies over that period so that they could avert the disaster, you would likely find that when you attempted to do so using your four principles it would be impossible to find anyone that was interested in learning the new concepts especially if they were much different from the currently accepted concepts.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe in being polite and considerate of others and to live peaceably with others as much as possible in general, but I have found that sometimes others use those same concepts to try to control and manipulate people for their own selfish benefit at the expense of those that are trying to be good in their actions. I will often suffer it when it just has to do with me, but when the lives or well being of others are at stake different tactics are often more prudent.
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John Merryman wrote on Nov. 19, 2008 @ 18:35 GMT
Paul,
That's going to take me a few days to really process. Some thoughts though;
One of the consequences of my observation about the nature of time, that energy goes from past events to future ones, while these events go from being in the future to being in the past, is that while energy and information are inseparable, but they are opposite sides of the same coin. So when you...
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Paul,
That's going to take me a few days to really process. Some thoughts though;
One of the consequences of my observation about the nature of time, that energy goes from past events to future ones, while these events go from being in the future to being in the past, is that while energy and information are inseparable, but they are opposite sides of the same coin. So when you ask, "What exists?" I would say that it is the energy which exists, but it must manifest information/shape/structure, etc. This structure is first potential, then as long as the energy manifests it, it is present, then when the energy has drained from it, it becomes past. Obviously much evidence remains of the past, but it is degrading and constantly being recycled as supporting structure for new combinations, etc.
As for how light can redshift as a function of distance, I admit I'm speculating, as I find the current expanding universe model, with the various additions required to support it, especially Inflation Theory, increasingly illogical. How can the very fabric of space expand, if we still have a stable lightspeed against which to measure it. I understand your point that a normal wave would be blueshifted as it is stretched, but how about transverse waves? It does get to the very nature of light.
Another logical problem I have is the description of space as "three dimensional. It would seem any three dimensional perspective of space is subjective to the center point of these three lines. As any understanding of perspective shows, even the slightest changes can yield completely different sets of perspectives. So it would seem a proper description of space would describe it as infinitely dimensional. Dimensions are essential a function of direction and distance, yet another concept used to define space is that of volume. The same logic used to argue time is an additional dimension of space, could be used to argue that temperature is an additional parameter of volume, given that changes in volume will have a mathematical effect on the temperature of energy contained within.
As for conscious projection, it is probably not a subject I should have brought up, but the subject of consciousness has been introduced into the conversation by Narendra, among others and it just came out. It is something I've had affect me for as long as I can remember. Having spend much of my life outside, I guess I've just spent too much time studying the patterns in the atmosphere which seem to integrate through the surface of the eye after awhile. That it ties into my intuition we are essentially individual cells of some deeper being, much as our cells form us and that we come and go just as the cells that make us up come and go. It sounds a bit metaphysical and new agey, but it's equally hard nosed and blood thirsty, since life is a constantly evolving process which creates and consumes itself in order to grow. The absolute is the basis from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell. It's the energy pushing into the future, not the information receding into the past.
I have to get back to work.......
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john Merryman wrote on Nov. 19, 2008 @ 19:08 GMT
P.S,
"transverse wave"; In the sense that you aren't measuring the energy of just the point of contact, which is shorter in the conventional sense, but since the quanta reflects the entire wave, which is spread over such a big area. So the photon is a hologram of the entire wave. Solves the entangled particle, action at a distance problem.
"which creates and consumes itself in order to grow"; Just as energy creates and consumes information.
Now I am late....
Paul N. Butler wrote on Nov. 20, 2008 @ 08:59 GMT
John,
That is ok it takes me awhile to do the same also. It is better to think it through than to jump to quick conclusions.
It may be that we are looking at energy and structure differently. So far when you talk about energy it seems that you are talking mainly about electromagnetic energy. When I talk about energy I am going to a much lower level and to an all encompassing...
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John,
That is ok it takes me awhile to do the same also. It is better to think it through than to jump to quick conclusions.
It may be that we are looking at energy and structure differently. So far when you talk about energy it seems that you are talking mainly about electromagnetic energy. When I talk about energy I am going to a much lower level and to an all encompassing concept of motion. All things whether they be electromagnetic energy particles (or waves) or matter particles are made up of motions. These motions constitute the true energy as the motive force behind all large scale motion effects and resistance to motion effects that are generally attributed to forms of energy such as mechanical, electromagnetic, and potential energy, etc. They also constitute all structural components such as matter particles and all the large scale structures that are made from them. The only difference between electromagnetic energy (your energy) and matter particles (your structure) is that the matter particles contain an additional motion in the fifth dimension that causes its path in the first three dimensions to be curved rather than the straight-line path of energy. This curvature of its path causes the matter particle’s path to curve back upon itself to create a continuous local closed path for its motion to travel in. As viewed from my viewpoint matter or structure is just the next step up from energy particles in a hierarchical structure of motions. Both matter (structure) and energy are completely composed of the most fundamental entity, which is motion. Through interactions all of the motion contained in a matter particle can be transferred to other matter or energy entities causing the particle of matter to cease to exist. The same can happen to energy particles. The motions that they were composed of continue to exist, however, in the other matter or energy particles that they were transferred to. A matter particle’s fifth dimensional motion is the same as its fourth dimensional motion or its motions in the first three dimensions. It is only where the motion is located in the dimensional system that gives it its particular properties that it adds to the structure of the matter particle. This is the same for energy particles except they do not have a fifth dimensional motion. Instead of saying that energy is what exists and it manifests information/shape/structure, I would say that motion and the dimensional system exist and contain information and motion manifests or shows itself in the form of energy and matter (shape/structure) through the dimensional system. At the next higher level of translation, the energy is the mediator that manifests or allows us to detect and understand the matter structures, but the matter structures are really not just made of matter, they are the result of a delicate interplay of both energy and matter, which is in turn the result of the overall equilibrium between energy’s natural tendency to expand (travel in a straight line) and matter’s natural tendency to contract (travel in a curved path). When we say that something was in the present, but is now in the past, we do not mean that it has now ceased to exist because all of the energy has drained out and the matter that is left has collapsed into a black hole. As an example, if your car gets old and you take it to the recycling plant and it is melted down, it no longer exists as your car and is on the global level in the past, but the metal still exists in the form of that complex energy and matter interplay. It has only changed its shape through a series of motions. Structure does not need to collapse for time to pass. Expansion of energy is also not necessary for time to pass. As a particle of matter is traveling through its enclosed path time goes by because it travels through a distance at a given motion amplitude. The matter particle’s structure has not collapsed for the time to go by neither has the energy that is traveling in that enclosed path expanded for the time to go by. Instead the motion that would cause the expansion and the motion that would cause the contraction work together and counteract one another to create a stable path structure to make a stable matter particle structure. Yet time has occurred due to the motion through a distance or the change in position, which has occurred. When you look at your desk, it may look as though it is not moving and, therefore you may think that it is not experiencing time, but if you could look much closer at it you would see the molecules have vibrating motions, the atoms are moving in the molecules, the matter particles are moving in the atoms, the matter particles are moving in their enclosed paths, and various other interactions are occurring with external motion interactions with photons and matter particles, etc. If you back far enough away from the desk, you would see that it is moving around the earth’s center and moving around the sun, etc. All of these motions through distances with various motion amplitudes generate time for the desk. At this point it would be a good idea to look more closely at information and how it works in all of this. Let’s start with the simplest structure, a single motion in a single dimension. This motion contains three main entities of information. They are position, direction, and motion amplitude. The direction information is needed because of the bidirectional nature of the dimension to choose between one of the two possible paths of motion progression. It is set at the beginning of the motion and can only be changed as the result of an interaction with another motion or possibly the end of the dimension. Because it has only two possible states it only requires one bit to store it in information terms. The position information would also be set at the beginning of the motion and could be changed by the motion amplitude information or by an interaction with another motion. The motion amplitude information is also set at the beginning of the motion and can only be changed by an interaction with another motion. Notice that in the absence of an interaction with another motion or with the end of the dimension, the only information that can change is the position information and that change is controlled by the motion amplitude information. At any given present moment the motion amplitude information determines what the change in position information will be in the next moment. The only thing that would change as time goes by is the position information. The motion amplitude information determines how much that change will be for the next moment. The present motion conditions set up the changes for the next present motion conditions. I used the example of moments as if time is divided into some indivisible small unit called a moment, but that is not what I meant to convey. I was just trying to show it in a way that could be easier to visualize. Think of the moments getting smaller and smaller until they merge into a continuum. The result is still the same only you have analog information control instead of digital control. As you can see it all occurs in the present. The position information is continually updated at the rate determined by the motion amplitude information. Notice there is no need for anything to go into the future to inform it to change the position information by some amount. If you know the motion amplitude information content you can use it to determine the position of the motion and the value of the position information at some point in the future, but it does not exist that way until that future point becomes the present. Likewise, as the position information content changes, its previous contents no longer exist and become a part of the past. Only the present actually ever exists. The information entities are all conserved. Only the content of the information within the entities can change. In this case it is the position information that changes within the position information entity.
Because normal light waves do not blue shift we can see that a light wave does not create tension as it expands as a balloon does. This means that it would be more like a gas that would just get thinner with fewer molecules per unit of space as it expands rather than some type of cohesive entity that would be bound together as a single unit and would exert tension on itself as it was stretched. This would be more in line with the idea of the wave front being composed of individual photons than just a solid wave front. Another thing that seems to me to be an indication of the photon concept is that because the wave weakens in relation to the square of the distance it would seem that a wave front that had traveled billions of light years would be too weak to be able to generate photons at the end of its travel. On the other hand, if photons were initially generated they would each continue to contain the same amount of energy (motion) as long as they did not interact with anything on the way to the destination. You would just see fewer photons the farther away you were from the source because they would be spread further apart. At least a great part of the red shift is caused by interactions between light particles and sub-light particles. Sub-light particles are particles that travel in the first three dimensions at composite velocities less than the speed of light. They do not contain fourth or fifth dimensional motions and so they travel in a straight line like a light particle, but because they do not possess a fourth dimensional motion they do not exhibit frequency, wavelength, or variable mass effects. They do not have the angular components that generate the dynamic mass effect in energy particles because these are generated by the fourth dimensional motion, which they do not possess, so they only have a very small mass effect that is due to their composite three dimensional motion. They usually do not interact with matter particles because their mass effect is below the threshold of matter interactions, but they would interact some with energy particles. They would tend to slow the energy particle down in some direction in the first three dimensions, but this would cause motion to be induced back into the particle’s composite three dimensional motion from its fourth dimensional motion to restore it to the speed of light. The net result would be a slight reduction in the fourth dimensional motion, which would cause the frequency of the photon to decrease, its wavelength to increase, and its variable dynamic mass effect to decrease. Or to put it another way, it would be red shifted. The greater the distance that the photon traveled the greater number of such interactions it would experience and this would mean that the red shift would be proportional to the distance traveled.
First we do not actually live in a three dimensional world. Our structure is just such that we can only directly observe the first three. We can indirectly sense the fourth dimension by the frequency, wavelength, and variable mass effects that a fourth dimensional motion causes in energy photons and matter particles. We can indirectly detect the fifth dimension by the curvature effect that a fifth dimensional motion causes in an energy photon to change it into a matter particle. We are used to thinking of three dimensions in terms of grid structures with length, width, and height delineated by reference lines with some zero point at the intersection. If you could look at the whole universe at once from outside of it, you might be able to see some preferred directions so that if you traveled in a certain direction you would be able to say I am traveling in only dimension number one and if you then stopped and turned ninety degrees in the proper direction and then started moving again you could then say now I am traveling only in dimension number two, etc., but from our perspective in which we only see a small part of the universe and we see it from inside of it, we have no visual cues to generate absolute coordinates. When we generate coordinates they are, therefore local constructs that are not tied in any way to actual dimensions and therefore one such construct can greatly vary compared to another one in its alignments of dimensional lines because the chosen alignments are either randomly chosen or are chosen in relation to some particular structures in the universe with no standard references for all such constructs. The concept of dimensional lines is much like the concept of moments that I used above. You can just think of adding more and more lines parallel to the existing lines until you have a continuum. The best that we can do at this time is to think of the combination of the motions in one, two, or all of the first three dimensions (the three dimensional composite motion) as producing a certain composite motion amplitude in some direction in the first three dimensions. We cannot determine how much of that motion is produced by dimension one, two, or three. We also cannot tell whether the motion is aligned with one of the dimensions with all of the motion coming from that dimension, whether it is aligned with two dimensions so that the motion is the composite motion of those two dimensions, or whether the motion is shared by all three dimensions. For most practical situations it really doesn’t matter though. If space was infinitely dimensional, it would take an infinite number of coordinates to describe a given location in it. You are right that temperature does vary with volume. If you are going to use that concept in regard to the whole universe, you would need to know at least either the initial or at least some earlier temperature and volume and either the present temperature or volume. The present temperature appears to be roughly known, but the other variables are not known by man in this world at this time.
It is not a problem to me that you bring up such topics because I believe in searching for the truth in all aspects of reality, so some topics like consciousness or other aspects of how our minds work and religion, etc. (that might be considered taboo to those who have their minds closed in such areas) are perfectly acceptable topics for study to me. That you have through your intuition developed the concept that we are essentially individual cells of some deeper being is interesting because if you look at the Christian scriptures, especially the New Testament, it is evident that God is saying that he is using this world to make a body for himself with each of us given the choice to become a member (a part) of that body if we desire. The scriptures say that God made us in his image and since we are composed of a spirit that generates our intents, a soul that turns those intents into thoughts, and a body that turns the thoughts into physical actions, it would be expected that he would be composed of a similar structure. In the scriptures it says that God is a spirit and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth, so that is the first part. It also says that there is one mediator between man and God, the man Christ Jesus. This places him in the position of our soul which is the mediator between our spirit and our body and translates the things from the spirit so that the body can understand them and translates those things from the body so that they are received by the spirit. As far as the ones who choose to become parts of his body are concerned, it says that in Christ we are many members, but one body, that Christ is the head of the body, and that God is the head of Christ. Another thing that I find interesting is that when we are conceived we get a part of our physical makeup from our mother through the information that is written into the DNA in the mother’s egg and we get the rest from our father from the information that is written in the DNA in the father’s sperm. The egg cannot generate a man’s body on its own and the sperm doesn’t do so either. It takes both joined together to generate a man’s body. In the scriptures it says we must be born again. That our first birth is for the birth of our body, but this second birth is for the birth of our spirit. This implies that when we are born into this world we have both parts that are needed to have a whole body, but only half of the information needed for our spirit to be born. It appears that we have the half that communicates with and has the necessary information to take care of our body, but don’t have the other half of the information that allows us to connect to and understand how to work as members of God’s body. This only comes when we get the other information needed so that our spirit can be born of God. In the scriptures, Jesus says the words that I say unto you they are spirit and they are life. This indicates that the information needed for the birth of a complete spirit either is the scriptures or at least it is contained in the scriptures and that only by taking that information in can a man have all the necessary information to allow his spirit to be born so that he is complete. The ones that do not choose to become parts of his body are used as parts of the machinery to make the body, but in the end when the body is complete they will be destroyed along with the rest of this world because the body is being made to last without end so the manufacturing plant won’t be needed any more after the body is complete. A new world will be made that is better than this one for God (in his body) to live in. It appears that in that world entropy will not exist as it does here because it says that when you make something it will continue and not deteriorate as things do here, as an example. I have always found it interesting how it is that the world is constructed in such a way that one thing will be made in the image of another thing so that even if we can’t see what an atom looks like directly we have larger scale things in the world such as the solar system from which we can derive concepts that can be used to gain an understanding of the things that we cannot see directly. These kinds of things are interesting to me, but if they are not to you just let me know.
I don’t have to get back to work, but I do need to get some sleep…….
I saw your P.S. just before I sent this so I will take a quick P.S. to your P.S., but don’t expect too much as I am tired. If the photon that is generated from the wave front gets its energy level from the entire wave front and not just from the part of the wave front at the point of contact, the energy coming from the parts of the wave front that are lets say millions of miles away on the other side of the expanding wave front would have to travel faster than the speed of light or else it would take an extremely long time to generate the energy photon. Energy does not create or consume information. It only can change the specific values stored in an information entity by causing one value to increase while another value decreases, as an example.
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John Merryman wrote on Nov. 20, 2008 @ 12:19 GMT
Paul,
I think we have generally the same understanding of energy, vs. information, though I may not have stated it as completely. At the temperature of absolute zero, there is no motion, so that even if some fundamentally eternal particle exists, it would have no contact with any other such particle and thus not exist from the perspective of any other reference. So motion itself is more...
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Paul,
I think we have generally the same understanding of energy, vs. information, though I may not have stated it as completely. At the temperature of absolute zero, there is no motion, so that even if some fundamentally eternal particle exists, it would have no contact with any other such particle and thus not exist from the perspective of any other reference. So motion itself is more important to creating reality, than any potential underlaying particle. As far as we are concerned, form follows function. So whether it is noun or verb, the energy cannot exist if it doesn't express information and the information does not exist if it is not expressed by energy. This has implications for the question of whether there are fundamental Platonic laws underlaying the physical reality, to which I would argue no, since they would imply information that isn't expressed by energy. Yes there is an overall repetitive nature to law, as that's what defines it as law, but I think that is due to identical causes yielding identical results.
As for theology, while I grew up assuming a basic monotheism, it occurred to me that any truly absolute state couldn't be expressed as form, or it wouldn't be absolute, so that any form it might happen to express wouldn't necessarily be unique. Therefore should another planet exist in which life took hold, that wasn't otherwise connected to the life on this planet, it would amount to a separate entity. As a perpetuating organism, like the whole of life on this planet, it would amount to its own god. If you follow the history of theism, it grew out of the idea that the group was a larger organism, of which individuals were temporary manifestations. Polytheism developed, as these various grouping intermingled and hierarchies of gods evolved out of the hierarchies of groups. These then melded into larger groups and adopted larger, ostensibly monotheistic religions. While they all gravitated to the original deity of a particular group of Semites, the original Jews, they have followed different paths. This branching has created different coordinate systems which are not identical. Sort of like people on different points on the globe have different coordinate systems, using the same three dimensional concept. Each thinking theirs is the one true one. The Greeks adopted Christianity, because the fable of a martyred king provided an analogy for their tradition of the practice of sacrificing a "year king" at the spring festivals. That said, I do have a certain affinity for the triune Christian deity, since I see it as reflecting a conceptual dualism defining the whole. Such as absolute and infinite defining the extant. Past and future defining the present. Order and chaos defining complexity. Also that as the spiritual absolute is basis, not apex, it is more the child than the adult.
Personally I'm more of a Gaian, as I see this planet as the only real defining singular unit for humanity. I see human civilization as the emerging central nervous system of this planetary organism, as opposed to its current role as top predator in a collapsing ecosystem.
now I'm late for work again...
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John Merryman wrote on Nov. 22, 2008 @ 01:07 GMT
Paul,
"Notice there is no need for anything to go into the future to inform it to change the position information by some amount. If you know the motion amplitude information content you can use it to determine the position of the motion and the value of the position information at some point in the future, but it does not exist that way until that future point becomes the present....
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Paul,
"Notice there is no need for anything to go into the future to inform it to change the position information by some amount. If you know the motion amplitude information content you can use it to determine the position of the motion and the value of the position information at some point in the future, but it does not exist that way until that future point becomes the present. Likewise, as the position information content changes, its previous contents no longer exist and become a part of the past. Only the present actually ever exists. The information entities are all conserved. Only the content of the information within the entities can change. In this case it is the position information that changes within the position information entity."
I didn't mean to imply that information is transmitted into the future, but that waves can pull energy back toward them, as they build, much as the tsunami caused the tide to go out before it struck. I was specifically trying to understand how a creature might perceive a coming event, before it is obvious, without actually foretelling the future.
"Because normal light waves do not blue shift we can see that a light wave does not create tension as it expands as a balloon does. This means that it would be more like a gas that would just get thinner with fewer molecules per unit of space as it expands rather than some type of cohesive entity that would be bound together as a single unit and would exert tension on itself as it was stretched. This would be more in line with the idea of the wave front being composed of individual photons than just a solid wave front. Another thing that seems to me to be an indication of the photon concept is that because the wave weakens in relation to the square of the distance it would seem that a wave front that had traveled billions of light years would be too weak to be able to generate photons at the end of its travel. On the other hand, if photons were initially generated they would each continue to contain the same amount of energy (motion) as long as they did not interact with anything on the way to the destination. You would just see fewer photons the farther away you were from the source because they would be spread further apart."
A counter argument to this is that is would be very difficult to determine the exact point of origin for expanding gas atoms. On the other hand, if they expanded out as a circular wave, we would know where the center point of that wave is. Now we are only at one point on that wave, yet as the radiation is a constant process, the point where these waves crossed our detector would produce a constant point of light.
"If the photon that is generated from the wave front gets its energy level from the entire wave front and not just from the part of the wave front at the point of contact, the energy coming from the parts of the wave front that are lets say millions of miles away on the other side of the expanding wave front would have to travel faster than the speed of light or else it would take an extremely long time to generate the energy photon."
It would generate the energy from the area of contact, but could the specific photon be a reading of the wave front, which is stretched, not just the energy of the specific point of contact, since this wave is stretched before it makes contact? If the photon was only a function of the direct point of contact, would it still have the wave aspect? We detect it as a light particle, or quanta of light, but if it traveled from the source as a singular particle, would it really produce the wave effect in the way which it does?
As quanta of light, photons would be like drips of water which are similar in size, due to surface tension and gravity, but dissolve into a larger pool of water. Re; the idea of "entangled particles."
"If you are going to use that concept in regard to the whole universe, you would need to know at least either the initial or at least some earlier temperature and volume and either the present temperature or volume."
I was just using it as an accepted example of how temperature and volume correlate.
"Energy does not create or consume information. It only can change the specific values stored in an information entity by causing one value to increase while another value decreases, as an example."
Wouldn't that be an analog description of information content being adjusted, while the energy content remains the same? It's like the old saying that you can't have your cake and eat it too. The information of the whole cake is lost, while that of its taste is gained.
Better post this and study the situation some more.
Regards,
John
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Narendra wrote on Nov. 23, 2008 @ 06:38 GMT
Dear Paul,
i saw your response of 19th to my post of 17th. Many thanks. I admire your concern for the humanity at large, as reflected in the response. But mind you, destiny is controlled by factors unknown and howsoever righteous one may be, it matters only if others respond in the same manner. I find no conflict between mine and your views in a broad sense. The details are bound to vary. To quote a young man of 20 years among us, Clinton "Kyle" Miller, what matters in life is this moment, as we can act only in it, neither in the past nor future. The latter two only can give us tension and anxiety, respectively. Also, thinking ourselves to be living in this world of ours that is certainly not of our making, why one need to worry much about calamities/tragedy. One can help others in overcoming them provided we act. Actions are possible in the present moment. Kindly see some of the postings on my essay as well as of that of Kyle and hopefully you and John Merryman will find others intersting too! Please ignore such specific requests, as i am just trying to emphasize that the world is not centred around us but the reverse is true!
John Merryman wrote on Nov. 23, 2008 @ 15:56 GMT
Paul,
"As viewed from my viewpoint matter or structure is just the next step up from energy particles in a hierarchical structure of motions. Both matter (structure) and energy are completely composed of the most fundamental entity, which is motion."
I thought you would like this;
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirm
ed-matter-is-merely-vacuum-fluctuations.html
Paul N. Butler wrote on Nov. 24, 2008 @ 10:45 GMT
John,
The idea that at absolute zero there is no motion is something that I have seen a lot lately, but it is not true. Absolute zero is the temperature at which no energy radiation occurs. If you don’t take the extreme view that this means the point where all matter has decayed into energy and the energy has completely dissipated (empty space) in order to not have any energy radiation...
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John,
The idea that at absolute zero there is no motion is something that I have seen a lot lately, but it is not true. Absolute zero is the temperature at which no energy radiation occurs. If you don’t take the extreme view that this means the point where all matter has decayed into energy and the energy has completely dissipated (empty space) in order to not have any energy radiation from decaying matter particles, it would usually be considered the point at which all matter particles in the system are at their lowest energy levels in atoms and the atoms are at their lowest energy levels in their molecules, etc., so that they will not drop to a lower level and radiate energy photons. In this condition there is still much motion in the system. First, each matter particle’s fourth and fifth vector (dimensional) motions still exist, so the particles are all traveling in their enclosed paths. The electrons, protons, and neutrons are still moving within the atoms. These motions are generally considered to involve local transfers of photons and other particles within the atoms for various reasons to maintain the stability of the atoms. They generally just don’t radiate outside of the atom. The atoms can still have some motions inside the molecules, etc. You are right that motion is more important to creating reality than any underlying particle because any underlying particle is composed of motion. An element of information can generally be looked at as a trait of a structure. Energy is a structure, so it contains information. The concept of information goes deeper than energy, however. As an example a dimensional system contains information even when it is empty of matter and energy because it contains information that is determined by its structure. Let’s look at a simple bi-directional one-dimensional system for an explanation of what I mean. Because it is a bi-directional system, direction information is structurally a part of the system. If the dimension remains empty of motion, the directional information might never be expressed externally, but the potential still exists as a property or information element of the dimensional system. It is like saying that your microwave oven can heat food. If you never put any food in it and turn it on, it will never actually heat food, but it still possess the information of the ability to do so built into its structure. All spatial dimensional systems possess position information. This can vary from one infinitely small position in a zero dimension system to an infinite number of positions in a one-dimensional or larger system. If the dimension is long enough to contain at least two entities with some space between them, and is actually capable of containing such entities, other elements of potential information are generated. Just the ability to contain entities is information. Any dimensional system that can contain at least two entities with some space between them also generates such information concepts as distance (as the amount of space or separation between the entities.) Distance generates motion information as the way to change from one position to another position by traveling through the distance or separation between two entities. Some information elements are essentially passive as part of the structure or its capabilities and don’t change from their initial conditions while other elements are active and can change often. The ability for a dimensional system to contain entities and the type of entities that it can contain are design functions that will usually remain constant during the existence of the dimensional system. Entity position and motion information for individual entities can change quite often, on the other hand. You can see then that information can exist as a part of a structure whether it is expressed in a way that we can detect it or not. As an example, the dimensional system of our world may have a great amount of behind the scenes structure and structural information that man cannot detect at this time. That would not mean that it did not exist merely because it is not expressed in a way that it can be presently detected by man. To put it another way, the inability to transfer or express information does not delete that information from existence. It merely becomes dormant. If you put a thermometer in a container that has matter in it at absolute zero, you will not get a reading on the thermometer because no free photons or matter particles will interact with it, but this does not mean that the matter in the container no longer exists, because of the lack of interaction expressed in a way that you can detect. In practice the matter particles would still be expressing information within the atoms and the atoms would be expressing information within molecules, etc. It would have just become a private local enclosed system of information transfer with you left outside of it. If you did not know that the container had matter in it you would not know of the existence of the matter in it, but that would not change its actual existence. It is true though that information in one system that is expressed to us can give us some knowledge about some of the information elements in another system, especially if the two systems are joined in some way like the entities that exist in the dimensional system are joined to the dimensional system and thus share some information elements with it. Since energy can only exist and function in the dimensional system in accordance with the structural information that is built into the dimensional system, it is apparent that there are fundamental laws or structural information elements that energy is subject to and must obey in order to exist as energy within the dimensional system. This information would exist as a part of the structure of the system whether or not energy was present in it or not. I will give one more example before leaving this subject for now. A flashlight is a system designed to generate photons in the visible light spectrum. If it is switched off, it will not generate those photons. The flashlight is still made of materials according to specific rules or laws that allow all of its parts to be assembled so that it is capable of generating photons even though it is not doing so. If you turn the flashlight on, it will generate photons and it may be that you can determine some of the details of the structure and rules or laws governing its generation of photons, but you may not be able to determine every detail of construction or the laws by which all the parts fit together and generate the photons from just viewing the outputted photon energy. This does not mean that the flashlight does not contain lead acid batteries of a specific plate size to allow it to generate a specific amount of total current through the bulb filament so the batteries will last for some specific designed in time period just because you might not be able to detect that level of detail of its structure from observing the emitted photons.
I grew up in a similar situation mostly in a catholic background where I was taught some things about God from their catechism, but was not actually introduced to the scriptures. I was told that God would answer our prayers and was disappointed when I asked God to do something for me that was important to me at the time, but it was not done. I then took the attitude that I did not have adequate proof that God either did or did not exist, although I tended to come down on the side of the predominate scientific theories of the day, which was the steady state theory of the universe and evolution. Because I have always desired to understand the world and how it works, I spent the next 22 years working to understand how and why things in the world work the way that they do. In those early days it was relatively easy to believe in the above theories because it took me quite awhile to get an in depth understanding of how the world works that was in any way more advanced than existing theories and those theories seemed to offer a possible alternative to God’s existence because the steady state theory suggested that the world may have always existed and on the surface evolution seemed to describe how life forms could have developed because at that time not a great deal was known about the tremendous complexity of living creatures. As time went on the steady state theory was shown to be wrong and all indications were that the world had a beginning. This meant that it definitely was created. It was then only a matter of determining who or what created it. At the same time new information about living creatures was showing that they are much more complex than they had been believed to be earlier. Because the theory of evolution is based on changes occurring by chance mutations it is apparent that the more complex life structures are the more such changes would be necessary to generate the higher level of complexity observed. At the same time my studies into such things as entropy showed that the world outside of living creatures tends to actively work to break down such complex highly organized high potential energy structures. I also began to see that a great amount of genetic variability was built into the structure of living beings so that great changes in a given creature can occur to allow it to adapt to its environment without the need for any mutations. This can be seen in the great diversity in the variations that have been produced in dogs due to breeding them for specific traits that are already built into their DNA structure with no need for new changes to occur through mutations. In addition, it looked like living creatures have the built in ability to dynamically modify specific traits while they are still alive thus allowing a creature to adapt to some changes during its life time. It has recently been discovered by man, as an example, that the body has the ability to turn certain genes on or off to generate changes to adapt to environmental changes and that these changes can then be passed down to offspring in addition to the basic DNA information. Because of the large amount of DNA structure that is still considered to be junk DNA (man’s usual response to things that are not understood) it is likely that many other similar mechanisms still wait to be discovered. Much of the variation that has been in the past attributed to evolution by many has turned out to be just due to these built in adaptation structures. It is likely that even such things as a virus’ ability to change its appearance to the bodies defense mechanisms so that it is not recognized and attacked are due at least for the most part to these built in variability structures. This means that small incremental changes due to mutations would create no advantage to a living creature that had them if they are within the built in adaptation variability of the creature. As an example, if an environmental change occurs that can be compensated for by the creatures built in variability, a change caused by a mutation that would also allow the creature to survive the environmental change would create no natural selection advantage for the creature that had the mutation because all of the creatures would survive with or without the mutation. This would mean that small incremental changes would likely die out or at least not be widely spread. Large changes due to mutations still could occur, but it has been understood for a long time that such larger changes are less likely to occur and the ones that do occur are more likely to also include negative traits that would threaten survival. This much greater structural complexity than had previously been thought to exist along with the much greater built in adaptation ability than had previously been conceived of by man, makes it extremely unlikely that all of the much greater number of changes than had previously been understood to be needed to account for all of the variations in living creatures could happen within the already long time periods that had been predicted to be necessary for them to occur in. These changes in the depth of knowledge and others also that I can’t go into now make evolution such a long shot that it would require much greater blind faith to continue to believe in evolution to describe all the variation in living creatures than to believe in God as the source of them. At the same time I began to consider something that science seemed to be largely ignoring, which was the cause of the first living creature. There had been some experiments that attempted to create the environment that was believed to exist in the world when it was presumed that life began on earth. These experiments had produced some basic complex molecules, but nothing close to the complexity of a DNA molecule that contains the structural code of even the simplest life forms and this was not the result of mere chance, but the purposeful attempts of the most intelligent beings from this planet. Beings that like to build complex structures. I believe that man has not yet been able to make such a DNA molecule from the base materials without using life structures in some way. For some reason, I do not see much about any recent attempts to generate life experimentally and no positive results. It may be that those involved decided that it would be a hopeless waste of time. The first problem with the idea of the spontaneous generation of the first living creature is that to even generate the most simple form of life that could reproduce, would require a large number of complex molecular structures to all just happen to come about by chance at about the same time in the same place and come together and generate a living creature in a very short time before they were destroyed by the environment. When life seemed to be much simpler than it is known to be today, that did not seem too far out, but even given man’s limited knowledge at this time of the true ultimate complexity of living creatures it would be too improbable to be considered a viable scientific theory by anyone unless it was just an attempt to support some illogical belief system. The second problem comes from looking at the proposition of spontaneous generation of life from the other side, which is that if perchance some how the probability to generate the first living creature, was within the range that would allow it to happen, we should see many new life forms coming about today from all the at least millions of piles of DNA molecules and the other complex molecules needed to produce living creatures that are deposited at various places all around the earth when living creatures die in the wild. This is because the part of producing the first living creature that would be the most improbable would be the creation by the natural environment of all the necessary component parts at about the same time in the same place. The actual joining of the components into the living creature would have to happen in a short time before the parts were destroyed by the environment. One explanation for the fact that we do not see new living creatures springing up from all this ready made material is that living creatures eat them up first or that the atmosphere, etc. is now different in such a way as to prevent it from happening. It would seem that a simple experiment could be performed to see if this is the case or not. First a room or vessel of some sort would be prepared that would contain the atmosphere and other environmental variables set to the values that are believed to be the least likely to destroy the life structures and at the same time allow the greatest chance for them to come together to generate a life form. Any life forms that may have accidentally gotten into the vessel would then be killed. Then some very simple life form would be grown in a large quantity and then killed in such a way as to not destroy the life material. The life material thus prepared would be placed into the vessel. One would then expect new life forms to come from this material in a short time. My guess is that this experiment will never be tried (at least not publically) because the forgone conclusion would be that it would fail to produce life. The same problem exists concerning the creation of the universe in that all of the theories break down before you get all the way back to the moment of initial creation except for the theory that the universe was created by God. The only other current theories that attempt to go to a point before the creation of our universe are the multiverse/megaverse/landscape theories that are based on the idea that there exists some large place that has always existed that creates large numbers of universes that exist for some time and then go back out of existence. This is just a rehash of the steady state universe concept on a larger scale with the always existing part moved out of the range of scientific observation and testing. These theories are therefore not true scientific theories, but unprovable philosophical hypotheses that would have no more scientific basis than the concept that God created the universe. They are in essence the atheist’s creation story. Before these current theories were developed I came to the conclusion that the scientific theories that then existed all broke down before getting back to the moment of creation and that if I ignored that problem the problem still existed that the natural world without life would not have created life. At about that time I came to the conclusion that the basic structure behind the energy and matter that makes up our world would require a dimensional system with five dimensions. I figured that for binary symmetry there would likely actually be eight dimensions though the matter and energy that makes up our world would not participate in the top three dimensions. Not long after that I had a day that I had very little to do and so I thought I would amuse myself by looking at my wife’s copy of the scriptures. I just happened to open it up to the book of the revelation of Jesus Christ and to my amazement I found that the descriptions of the heavens and the earth exhibited the same patterns of structure that I thought I had discovered myself and that I could find no other person who had any knowledge of this structure, but here it was in a book that had been written about two thousand years ago. This got me interested so I began to read the whole scriptures and found more information in the book of Ezekiel that also agreed with the concepts that I had discovered. The main difference between the two accounts is that Ezekiel saw the heavens looking up at them from the earth while John was taken up to heaven and saw them from that perspective. The two different perspectives should have caused some differences in what they saw and that is exactly what is recorded in the scriptures. I also found the creation account in Genesis interesting because it included that God’s first action after creating the empty earth system was to introduce motion into it, etc. There are many other things such as patterns of behavior of people and basic concepts of how one can be more sure that something is true, etc. that I tested to see if they work and found that they do work as described in the scriptures. There are also many prophecies that make predictions about things that will come to pass and the ones that are supposed to have already come to pass have done so. I have looked at some other religion’s books and have not found such things and as I described above the atheist doctrines don’t have the answers either. To look at a planet’s life structure as an overall organism composed of all of the individual life forms entwined by their interactions with each other is not a bad concept, but I could never consider it to be a god to me. To me only the God that is over and greater than all other gods would be worthy of worship or to serve. He would have to be intelligent as it would not make sense to serve some mindless chance mechanism or some generalized force. His intelligence would have to be greater than mine. He would have to possess the ability to continue his existence without end because it would not make sense to worship someone that could die before you and since it would be desirable for him to preserve my life endlessly also beyond the life in this world he would need to possess great or preferably all power so there would not be something greater than him that he could not protect himself and me from. He would have to actually care for me as it would not do much good to serve someone that hated me and would desire to destroy me or was indifferent to me and would not save me. He would have to know all things so he would not unknowingly tell me to do something that would lead to my or his destruction or even great suffering with no gain worthy of the suffering. As you can see just from these requirements the earth life system falls greatly short of being worthy to be worshipped as God with the big G and the ones with the small g are not truly worthy because they cannot control all things for our benefit or his. The earth life system could easily be destroyed if the sun exploded or if the earth was hit by a large enough meteor, etc. so it really can’t protect us. I am not sure where you got your history of theism, but it differs greatly from what I have seen in this world. First the belief in a god or gods is usually attributed in most nonreligious sources that I have looked at to the fact that early people saw that they lived in a world in which they had very little control over their lives. As an example, their lives were very dependent on their ability gather enough food to stay alive and be healthy, but if there was not enough rain at the right times or not enough sunny days at the right times the plants that provided food for them and there animals would either dry up and not produce food or not grow fast enough to produce enough food for their needs. This caused them to begin to worship the sun and rain gods, etc. that they made up with the hope that they would give them good crops, etc. If a particular leader or conqueror developed great power he might also be worshipped as a god and this likely had a lot to do with the development of the Greek and Roman gods that were based on gods with the personalities, weaknesses, and other traits and actions of men. The Gaian type of thinking of the world as some overall organism as a source of power did not greatly come into play until somewhat later as a part of witchcraft traditions and doctrines. The three main monotheistic religions all trace the connection of man to God back to Abraham and before that all the way back to the first man Adam. According to the Old Testament man originally knew God and lived in his presence until Adam and Eve sinned and were cast out of the Garden of Eden so they would not eat of the tree of life and live forever. God still dealt directly with men that were righteous and desired to serve him such as Abraham, and his son Isaac, and his son Jacob who was later called Israel by God. Later when God worked directly with Moses to bring the people of Israel out of Egypt he gave the Old Testament laws to Moses who then gave them to the people of Israel. The scriptures, therefore, give a different picture of religion’s development in that man originally knew God and knew that he is the only true God, but as people began to leave God to do their own desires they made up many false gods. In the scriptures God makes fun of them by saying that they would cut down a tree and carve a god out of part of it to worship and would then cast the rest of the tree into the fire so how was that piece of a tree that they threw into the fire any more special than the part that they destroyed in the fire or how could it save them. In the New Testament God gives a more detailed description of what happens when someone that knows God goes away from him. In the first of the three steps of a man leaving God he stops thanking God and glorifying him for what he has done for the man. He then goes off into his own imagination and begins to think of God as if he is a man or some animal and makes false gods to worship. The third and last step occurs when the man does not desire to keep God in his remembrance any more so God then gives him over to a reprobate spirit (Satan) and he then does all kinds of evil as a follower of the Devil. These are the true atheists. My wife once told me that she always wondered why those that do not believe in God seemed to be so intent on removing anything about God from public view or mention and were not just satisfied to live their lives according to their beliefs and respect believer’s rights to live their lives according to their beliefs also. I showed her that God made it so that the last step of leaving God was to desire to not keep God in their remembrance so anything that would remind them Of God would be offensive to them and they could not be otherwise because it is built into the creation of which they are a part to work that way. It is easy to see why those that take the first step away from God would divide into many different branches because although only one truth in all things exists, there are at least a very large number (possibly an infinite number) of falsehoods that can be imagined in one’s mind. It is interesting that you apparently regard the life of Jesus Christ as just a fable when the historical data that establishes the fact that he did in reality live is much stronger than that for many others that people accept as having existed without doubt. His existence is recorded not only in the scriptures, but in other early secular history sources as well.
My guess is that if you lived long enough you would change your view somewhat because if man eventually expands throughout the solar system you would probably replace this planet with this solar system in the same way that earlier people would have limited such statements to the more limited parts of the planet that they knew about and had the ability to gain control over or at least access to. We all live in a cage within a cage within a cage, etc. type of an environment and our beliefs and concepts are limited to the parts of the overall cage that we have the keys to so that we have access to those parts of the whole cage. Anyone that has gained access to a larger part of the whole structure than others also gains a wider range and depth of concepts and more assurance of true beliefs while receiving more evidence to allow the rejection of false beliefs. I have found that this planet is only a very small part of a much larger system that when it is more understood leads to a greater understanding of the true origin of the organization of structures that it is composed of.
Now I’m late for sleep again… I will try to answer your Nov. 22 entry tomorrow if I can get access to the computer.
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Narendra nath wrote on Nov. 24, 2008 @ 13:37 GMT
Dear Paul,
i must say going through your last post was quite a bit of strain for my eyes. Your long justification for the existence of God or not is just a personal matter for you or any other individual. What i may like to tell you will be to let you know that you are human being with both rationality and emotionality components like any one else. Our behaviour is not governed by science although we do govern the science as we create it through our ingenuity.
The other point i wish to bring to your attention concern the awesome size and energy content of the Universe. Just compare your existence with it.It humbles us all if not you. The word God is also a human creation as God is not a somebody like us who has created all this for us to worry about! Let me suggest that you opt for 'consciousness', cosmic and individual and recognize that some connection exists between the two. The whole creation involves 'motion/vibrations' of some sort and that becomes 'physical' forus to deal in science. The rest is nonphysical consciousness. As you see the logical pattern in the evolution of the Universe, you will appreciate the 'Creator' if any. Names don't matter. he immense energy, the logical pattern with gradual coming of different celestial objects, then earth and then air , water, plants/trees and then animals and last of all the Humans. Only we are able to comprehend the secrets of nature. We are born not out of our own desire and we also die not as per our wish. We only can live by our wish!
Just to end, let me tell you that there are some secular religions too in this world, may not be in the west to which you may happen to belong, but in the east. True religion to me is the one that one practices in his actions and not what he may belong to o/c birth or for any other reason! names don't matter here too.
I hope you had a good sleep and are no too worried to let John know more of what you feel like telling him and take tension of access to computer! Relaxation of mind is very essential for the contributions that one may make towards the good of humanity and the environment we all live in!
Paul N. Butler wrote on Nov. 26, 2008 @ 06:22 GMT
John,
Sorry I couldn’t get at the computer yesterday due to other things coming up. Also I noticed after I sent it that I kind of got carried away on my history and made a very long comment you don’t need to regard or comment on all of it. It just sort of flowed out and I was tired at the time. I’ll try to be more restrictive in the future. Now to answer your Nov. 22...
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John,
Sorry I couldn’t get at the computer yesterday due to other things coming up. Also I noticed after I sent it that I kind of got carried away on my history and made a very long comment you don’t need to regard or comment on all of it. It just sort of flowed out and I was tired at the time. I’ll try to be more restrictive in the future. Now to answer your Nov. 22 comment.
In nature there are many such things that can give advance notice of some event that is coming, such as a sudden change in temperature or the smell of water in the air before a storm arrives. Most can be looked at as just the beginning effects of the event. You are right that people often concentrate so much on other things that they don’t pick up on these beginning effects. In the case of the water receding before the tsunami wave arrives it is the result of the limited medium in which the wave travels. The wave forms in the somewhat cohesive medium of water molecules in the liquid form. As the wave height rises the water to fill up that height must come from somewhere, so it is drawn from the surrounding water. This causes the surrounding water level to go down including the water in front of the wave. If light waves do not travel through a medium, one would not expect to see that effect with light waves.
It probably would be difficult to determine the point of origin from expanding gas atoms because they would likely interact with each other in the wave front so that their directions of travel could be different after awhile from their original directions away from the point of origin. Light photons, however, would not as likely interact with each other in such a way as to alter their directions. It is evident, however, that some interaction does occur because a beam of light does tend to spread out to some extent as it travels. Any photon that traveled all the way from its source to a destination interaction without any other interactions on the way would still contain the directional information within it that could be traveled back upon to its source. A continuous flow of photons would produce a similar constant point of light. There would just be fewer photons passing a given point the farther the point was from the source because of the increased volume that they would occupy on the expanding front. Photons that were emitted later would not necessarily line up with the ones in front of them, so if there was a space between two photons due to the expansion such that the measurement point was between them, the next layer of photons could have a photon that would be in the space that was between the previous photons that missed the detector so that it would interact with the detector. The detector would just see fewer photons the farther away it was from the detector because in some layers of photons a space rather than a photon would pass the detector.
If the wave front was composed in such a way that it was cohesive and would stretch, one would expect to see the blue shift on any standard wave front. More over a stretched wave front would store an increased amount of energy the more it was stretched and it would, therefore, generate either more or more energetic (higher frequency) photons in an interaction the farther the wave front was from its origin due to the increased stretching due to the wave front’s expansion. One would also expect that at some point the wave front would either break or would run out of energy to cause further expansion and would then collapse back toward the source. Each photon contains the wave effect within itself in its fourth dimensional motion. As it travels at the speed of light in the first three dimensions, it also travels in and out of the first three dimensional structure through the fourth dimension. This generates what is seen as the frequency, wavelength, and variable mass effect that is known as the wave effect.
Although you have not told me the interaction details of how the wave front would generate photons, it would seem to me that if you aimed a very weak light source wave (one that would only generate a few sensor hits per second) at the top of a sensor array that was built in a step shape with a sensor at the top and a sensor on each step so that the top sensor was closest to the oncoming wave front and each successive step was farther away from the wave front than the step before it, one would expect that the wave would be the strongest when it reached the sensor on the top step and would be most likely to interact with it. The interactions would proceed down the steps until the wave was too weak to generate further photons. The sensors on the top step would detect more photons than the ones toward the bottom because the wave front would have more energy when it interacted with them. I believe that if you did this experiment you would find that the photons that were sensed would not be distributed in that way, but would likely be more evenly distributed on the sensors, which would be expected if individual photons were emitted, especially if the source was aimed at the lowest step, which should not affect the results if you had an expanding wave front that would still hit the top step first even if the source was not directly aimed at it.
In that case you are right that if you increase the volume of a container and all other variables remain the same (i.e. no increase in energy added to the container, etc.), the temperature inside the container will drop unless it is already at absolute zero. Sorry I thought you were thinking of a wider context.
The information entities (roughly the storage places for information) and the information that is in them that are a part of the structure of the dimensional system can not be changed by the motion entities that exist in that structure. As an example, the motion entities cannot change how the dimensions interact with one another (i.e. the first three dimensions intersect at ninety degree angles, etc.) or change a bi-directional dimension into a unidirectional dimension. All entities that exist in the dimensional system are structures composed of motions. Each motion contains certain information entities that define the motion. Such an information entity can contain a variable that can be changed from one information content to another. In the absence of an interaction of some type, all motion entity’s information entities remain the same and the information entity’s information contents also remain the same except for variables such as position that are changed by the contents of other information entities such as motion amplitude that are a part of that specific motion’s information set. When an interaction occurs between two motions, the information contents of both motion entities’ information entity’s can be combined in
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Paul N. Butler wrote on Nov. 26, 2008 @ 06:35 GMT
Narendra,
Your Nov. 23 comment
You are right that destiny is controlled to various degrees by others, but ultimately it is controlled by the one at the top no matter what others do. My position is to make it easier for the others if possible to accept the necessary changes that will happen. You are also right that we can only act in the present. The information that we have stored...
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Narendra,
Your Nov. 23 comment
You are right that destiny is controlled to various degrees by others, but ultimately it is controlled by the one at the top no matter what others do. My position is to make it easier for the others if possible to accept the necessary changes that will happen. You are also right that we can only act in the present. The information that we have stored of the past can be a guide to help us take the best present actions and wise intents for the future can help to carry those actions to completion. Not worry, plan and work to avoid them. Yes present action is needed. Yes the world is not centered around us, it is centered on the one that made it and rightly so.
Your Nov. 24 comment
You are right I did get carried away with my history and where it has led me, at least the part that I could give. I was tired at the time and it just seemed to flow out. Maybe there is some reason for someone who will read it. You never know what the whole purpose of such a thing is, at least until later. I hope your eyes were not too strained. You can always feel free to ignore my works if they are too much or you could do a little at a time if you want. I am trying to make this comment to you shorter for your sake. You are right that each person must choose for himself whether to believe in God. It is always best to give to others as much information as possible to help them make an intelligent choice. Our behavior is not governed by science, but it is governed somewhat by the laws that are written into the creation some of which have been given to man to understand by the use of the tool of science often guided by the insights that are given to men from above.
You are right about the awesome size and energy content of the universe. It points out the even greater awesome ability and power (energy content) of the one who took a small part of himself and made it. It should truly humble all of us to be able to be his. You are right that he has not made all this for us to worry about. He has made all this to make us and allow us to be joined to him as members of his body (the true connection between the two). Can this cosmic consciousness that you speak of generate intents to do something and then translate those intents into thoughts and then translate those thoughts into actions in the world to do anything? Yes all of the entities (whether energy or matter) in the creation are composed of motions. Yes there is also the spirit which is not made of these things. Yes looking at the creator’s creation even to the low level that I have attained to does make me appreciate the creator more and more as he shows me more about his creation and himself. Names and other words do matter because he has made and chosen them as one way to communicate himself to us and given us as his image to do the same to each other. I won’t go into the order of things at this time to keep it short. He has given us greater understanding than the other creatures of the earth. You are right that he did not give us to control our birth or death. It is best to live as he wishes!
Yes there are secular religions. Even a disbelief in God is a form of religion in which a man puts himself or something else up as the highest in the world (his god) for him to serve (worship) instead of God. You are right that one who possesses the true religion will show it in his words and also in all his other actions and you cannot be born into it by your birth in the flesh. You must make the choice yourself. Again, names matter because he has made them and applied them. It is for us to accept his works. You are right though that names that we make up do not matter and to attempt to change the names he has chosen to others that we make up will only cause separation from him.
Thank you I did have a good sleep, but other things kept me off the computer yesterday. I don’t worry. I just do what is given to me to do. John will be able to abide if it is for him to do so.
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nARENDRA wrote on Nov. 26, 2008 @ 13:52 GMT
Dear Paul,
Your post in my response indicates that you are in agreement with me on nearly all the issues. Please continue to hold on to your unique identity but also conserve your energy for helping others understand you better. he best way i find is to set personal examples through one's actions in life, big or small.It is true in both our personal and professional activity in sciences.We are both in a similar state, having retired from active professional career. But we certainly can provide our experience and knowledge to ones who sincerely seek the same from us, not otherwise. Otherwise we only tire ourself without benefiting the others.
John Merryman wrote on Nov. 27, 2008 @ 02:57 GMT
Paul,
Sorry I hadn't replied earlier. Religion is a tough topic to discuss, as it provides the foundation which we need to exist and to argue religion is to examine what is most profound to another. I don't question Jesus' existence. I don't even question his holiness, but as he expressed it, it seemed to me a matter of what he was saying all could achieve and it was only the institution...
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Paul,
Sorry I hadn't replied earlier. Religion is a tough topic to discuss, as it provides the foundation which we need to exist and to argue religion is to examine what is most profound to another. I don't question Jesus' existence. I don't even question his holiness, but as he expressed it, it seemed to me a matter of what he was saying all could achieve and it was only the institution that grew up in his shadow which placed him on a pedestal above all others. This is a natural tendency of bureaucracy to calcify the efforts of visionaries. They reach for the heavens, so it's natural for their followers to assume they made it.
My problem with monotheism is that I don't consider consciousness and knowledge as the same. Consciousness is the mystery. Knowledge is a feedback loop. It does tie into my distinction between "energy" and information. Consciousness is like that energy which goes from past events to future ones. Knowledge is that stream of information that starts as future potential and after churning through the present, becomes the structure of the past. Our individual live start in the future and end up in the past, yet that element of consciousness pushes the reset button, reloads the program and starts fresh, as a new generation.
The universal state of oneness, of unity, is not a set of one, a unit. It has no inside and outside. No us and them. As the essence from which we rise, it is the innocence of the child, not the set thought patterns of the adult. Like stem cells, it can take any form, but once it becomes set, it loses that adaptability.
Good and bad are not a metaphysical dual between the forces of light and darkness, but the basic binary code of biological calculation. The distinction between beneficial and detrimental. What is good for the fox is bad for the chicken, though the chicken has far more at stake. That is the way life works, because it creates in order to consume, as it bootstraps itself from small feedback loops, into ever larger feedback loops. Between black and white are not just shades of grey, but all the colors of the spectrum.
Hope this puts my theology in somewhat clearer form. I'l have to think through the physics of light some more. It is my feeling that energy does manifest as an expanding field, while mass is the manifestation of discrete particlization.
To tie both the theology and the physics together though, it is impossible to have the expanding energy, without then having the collapsing structure, just as it is impossible to have consciousness without those feedback loops of knowledge forming. It is necessary that the details of life recede into the past, in order to propel consciousness of life into the future.
As for the thoughts on absolute zero; Yes, there are situations where the energy isn't transmitted to measuring devices, yet they still exist, because they still have their own internal atomic structure, so to me, the existence of these measuring devices would mean their internal structure exists at something above absolute zero.
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Paul N. Butler wrote on Nov. 27, 2008 @ 07:30 GMT
Narendra,
I hope you are right that we agree on nearly all issues. When I was young it seemed to be important to me to have my own individual identity based on my accomplishments, so that I could feel good about myself and also have others think well of me, but as I have gotten older it is not something that I consider that important anymore. I began to look outward from myself and...
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Narendra,
I hope you are right that we agree on nearly all issues. When I was young it seemed to be important to me to have my own individual identity based on my accomplishments, so that I could feel good about myself and also have others think well of me, but as I have gotten older it is not something that I consider that important anymore. I began to look outward from myself and concentrate on learning more about the world around me rather than concentrating on myself. In the process I learned a lot about the world and that knowledge was then used by God to lead me to him. After I came to know of God I found that he is the one that truly deserves my concentration and that my identity is only as important as I am to him and is based on my relationship with him and not on anything in me of myself without him because we are made by him to fulfill his purpose for us. Our identity as members of his body is of more value and worth than anything that we could ever attain by our own works. My goal is more that people come to understand God more. It is not important that others understand me except as I through my words and deeds witness to them about God’s love for them so that they come understand him. I gave my history more to show how when I was young and foolish God gave me the knowledge that I desired about the world even though I at first tended to use it to doubt his existence. He knew that my desire to really know the truth about things would work through the information that he gave me and the knowledge that came from it to make me see that the concepts that I originally held to that had made me to doubt his existence were false. This left me in the middle ground not doubting, but at the same time not believing either. By giving me information and knowledge that was not yet known to man on earth and then leading me to open and read the parts of the scriptures that contained that information, he guided me into belief in him. His putting up with me for all those years when I was often working against him by trying to cause believers in him to doubt him and doing other things that I later found out to be against his will and his gentle guidance to bring me to him, has shown me the depth of his love for us. The joy that comes from knowing of his love for us and being joined to him as a member of his body (the only truly important identity) far exceeds all the joy that I had previously obtained from learning about how the world works. Not only that, but he has since given me much more knowledge of his works both concerning this world and also other places that I could never have hoped to have gotten by myself without him. It is good to know that you to are free from the working world so that you can help those that seek your experience and knowledge. Remember though that people must first know that you exist and have experience and knowledge to give them before they can seek it from you so don’t be afraid to offer help to others when you see that they could use it. Then you can let them decide if they want it and will then ask for it. Also be aware that some would desire to ask, but are too shy or embarrassed to do so. You may still be able to help them if you work it right. Another thing that I have seen is that when you give information to another, it may appear that it was not accepted at the time, but later you will observe that they do or believe the things that you told them and think that they thought of it themselves. Those that get their sense of worth from their accomplishments may be offended when they see this happen because they do not get the credit that they think they deserve, but to me it is just good to see that the person was helped. Maybe Carlo will get something useful from what we have offered to him that will help him later, as an example. Whether he answers or not is not necessarily important. Or maybe what was offered to him will help another who reads it you never know. It is all up to God. He just tells us to sow the seed. He is the one that makes it grow in the ones that he desires.
John,
I see your comment, but I need to get some sleep tonight so I can be awake for thanksgiving tomorrow as I am spending it with my youngest daughter’s family. I will try to answer it Friday if all goes well.
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Narendra Nath wrote on Nov. 27, 2008 @ 15:33 GMT
Dear Paul,
You gave me a lengthy post too. But i welcome it after what you posted for me at Carlo 's essay, indicating something 'low civilization' in my context. Ours is one of the oldest civilization , over 5000 yrs. ur ancient literatures on Vidanta Philosophy contains tips for the purpose of life and how it should be lived. Then , the literature of Patanjali on Yoga/ meditation is also over 3000 yrs old. The latter i quoted in my essay too. i am sure your remarks about Indian civilization on Carlo's post may have come inadvertently. I respect all civilizations that have enriched the modern humanity. As our essay contest posts close very soon, we both in the group of old retirees need to end such 'controversies' pleasantly, spreading universal love for the entire humanity!
Paul N. Butler wrote on Nov. 28, 2008 @ 19:27 GMT
John,
You are right and yet religion is really the most important area of life to get a good understanding of because of its long term significance to all of us, as it can make the difference between long term life and death. I am glad that you don’t question Jesus’ existence and holiness. You are right that Jesus said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the...
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John,
You are right and yet religion is really the most important area of life to get a good understanding of because of its long term significance to all of us, as it can make the difference between long term life and death. I am glad that you don’t question Jesus’ existence and holiness. You are right that Jesus said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. This does not mean that any man can do the works that Jesus did by himself, however, or that Jesus was just another man. The next verse gives the answer as to how it works. There Jesus says, And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. Notice that the man does not do the works himself, but asks Jesus and Jesus is the one that does the works and also notice that Jesus is doing the works in accordance with God the Father’s desire so that God the Father is glorified in the works. Those two verses are John 14, 12 and 13. In verse 6 of the same chapter Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the father, but by me. Here Jesus is saying in his own words that he is the mediator between God and man and the only way that a man can come to God is by him. This is very significant because he is saying that if a man tries to come to God in some other way he will not be able to do it because it is not acceptable to God for man to come to him in any other way. God the Father has set Jesus up as the only way to come to him. In addition he is saying that he is the source to go to for truth and life. It is true that some have come into the church and perverted the gospel of God and preached lies and done bad works, such as in the dark ages. It is interesting that the scriptures predicted that time saying that Satan’s seat would be in the church implying that Satan would rule the church institution for that period. As far as whether he made it to heaven, Jesus said he was going to God the Father who by all accounts has his throne in heaven. There were many witnesses that saw him ascend up to heaven and since the apostles did preach the gospel as Jesus had done and also asked in Jesus’ name and did other works that Jesus had done while he was on earth even bringing men back to life, etc. that would be another witness that he did get to heaven to the Father so he could fulfill his promise to do the works for them.
You are right that consciousness and knowledge are two different things. Consciousness has to do with our awareness inwardly of ourselves and outwardly of our surroundings. It has to do with our ability to observe and input information, from our bodies, our souls, our spirits and the external world that surrounds us. Knowledge is the result of the processing of those observations and that information. Knowledge can be in several forms. I will just give a couple so I don’t get carried away too much. If you see a repetitive pattern such as the sun rising and setting every day, you will at some point store that pattern in your mind and then based on that stored knowledge you will make plans and predictions of the future based on that pattern. If you combine that knowledge with knowledge gained from other observations such as how many days each season lasts, you can determine the best time to plant crops, etc. in the future. Another type of knowledge comes from categorizing similar things into groups under one general name. Many large plants that all have the same general traits are grouped together and called trees, as an example. This allows us to work on things in the world in a more orderly and less time consuming manner. Our consciousness is mostly lived in the present. It is usually mostly involved with present observations. We can, of course, also put our attention on and observe our stored records of past events or look at our stored plans for the future. We can also consciously process observations from those sources using stored knowledge to gain more knowledge and wisdom, etc. You are right that knowledge is generally stored in the structure of our minds in the form of records of events and the results of our processing of those events that make up our stored records of the past. They can then be called up in a later present time and be used in processing new observations. When you talk about consciousness pushing the reset button and starting fresh, as a new generation are you talking about reincarnation or just that those of the next generation possess and carry on consciousness as an existence so consciousness continues and does not cease to exist?
Your concept of the universal state of oneness is somewhat like what God is talking about in the body of Christ in that under God the Father is his son Jesus Christ and under him we are all equal members of his body, all joined together into one body in him. On the other hand it is not God’s intent that we be in the state of lack of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding as a little child or of stem cells that have not taken on their later useful forms. Instead he says that we will know as we are known. So as God knows us, in the body of Christ, in the world to come, we will also know him and each other and be able and willing to work together in love for one another for the gain of the whole.
With God, good and evil (bad) are considered to be so for two main reasons. First God made the world and knows how it works. The things that God calls good for us to do are those things such as to love him and one another, to have compassion on others, to have patience and long suffering with others, etc. that if followed by us will make for a better world to live in and a better existence for us in the world. The things that are called bad by God are those things such as killing others, stealing from others, committing adultery against your spouse, cheating others, bearing false witness against others, etc. that when done by us will destroy the world and men’s lives and make the world a worse place for us to live in and make our lives in the world worse. The second reason is that God’s intent is to create a body for himself and just like you would not like it if your body or some part of it decided to not do what you told it to do or to do things that you did not want it to do, in the same way God requires us to do as he desires for us to do because that is what is best for all of us, for the whole body, his son Jesus Christ, and for himself, so that we all enjoy and gain from working together as one. Therefore, not doing the things that God says are good or doing those things that he says are evil, is also rebelling against God, the head of the body and it is God’s desire to protect the whole body from such actions that could destroy the whole body if left unchecked. That is why when we do good we are really doing doubly good because we are not only doing things in a way that will make a better more enjoyable life for ourselves and the rest of the body, we are also doing things in a way that pleases the one that made us and the rest of his body and has the right to expect that we do what he desires for us to do. When we do evil we are also doing double evil because we are not only doing things that will negatively affect us and the whole body, we are also doing things that displease the one that made us and, therefore, has the right to expect us to do that which pleases him. To give an example that might make things clearer, suppose that one of your hands decided to stop doing what you told it to do so that when you told it to get some food and put it in your mouth because your body was hungry it instead threw the food on the ground so that it became no longer edible. Also suppose that it would make rude gestures to bullies so that they would come and beat up your body. At some point in order for your body to survive you would likely take some action to cause it to stop doing such things. If you went to a doctor and he told you that it was due to some disease that was at that time only in your hand, but would spread to the rest of your body if you did not have the hand cut off, you would likely have it cut off to save the rest of the body. In the same way when someone disobeys God (sins) it causes a separation between him and God. In the world it is evident that when people do those things that God says are evil to others it tends to encourage the others to do the same thing back to get even and so the evil spreads from one person to the next and increases and works in the world to destroy men’s lives and generally make life for all worse. The opposite can be seen when people do good. God has created the world in such a way as to provide for the needs and development of the members of his body. Other lower creatures are parts of the machinery that supply the needs of the body members. In an area that man has not expanded his control into, the foxes control the number of chickens so every thing remains in balance. When man enters into the area he reduces the number of foxes and uses the chickens for his food source. From God’s stand point it was good when the foxes ate some of the chickens when man was not there because it maintained the balance that God desired. It was also good for man to reduce the fox population so that he could have food for himself because the rest of the creation is made to support the production of God’s body members, which are men. You may be right that if the chicken could think at a high enough level, it might consider that any other creature that would eat it was doing evil from its viewpoint, but from the stand point of the one who made the whole creation to fulfill his purpose, that which helps to fulfill that purpose is good and that which works against its fulfillment is bad. I should note here that in the beginning the scriptures say that all animals ate plants. It was not until after sin entered into the world that animals began to eat each other or people began to eat animals. This is just another area where the negative effects of sin can be seen. It also says that it will be restored back to the way it was in the beginning again in the world to come in that man will eat fruit from trees.
Take your time and think it through thoroughly. Remember that energy possesses mass also, otherwise it would not be able to knock electrons out of atoms to cause the photoelectric effect. This mass is primarily caused by the angular motion effects caused by the fourth dimensional motion.
It is true that energy tends to travel away from its source at high speed due to its motions in the first four dimensions and that the fifth dimensional motion of matter that generates the angular motion components that produce the rest mass effect and causes motion to take a curved path tends to draw matter particles (mass) together. My point is that if that was all there was to it we would live in a world with one large central black hole composed of all the matter in the universe that would have collapsed there, and all of the energy that did not get pulled into the black hole would be speeding away from it in all directions at the speed of light. Our world does not look like that though. That is because the whole world is created in such a way as to generate a stable equilibrium between the outward movement of energy and the inward movement of mass at all levels of structure. This delicate balance between expansion and contraction and other things that show that the universe was designed to make life possible in our universe has recently been seen by many scientists and has been called the anthropic principle. This great evidence that the world was created by someone with great ability for a specific purpose has caused atheists to scramble to come up with some way to explain it away. The results are the various multiverse, megaverse, and landscape theories that invent an extremely large place that contains an extremely large number of universes of which ours is just one, so they can explain away the extreme improbability that our world would have come out the way that it did by chance. This large place has been put outside of any possibility of scientific observation and testing so it cannot be disproven. Of course from a scientific point of view it would have no more scientific validity than the belief that God created the universe since neither can be observed or tested. They are nevertheless hard at work to convince people otherwise. Let’s see how gullible people really are. My guess (though I could be wrong and hope that I am) is that they will be proven once again to be very gullible. It probably would be possible to have consciousness in the sense that one could observe himself and the world around him and see that he exists, but not have the processing ability to analyze the incoming information to produce knowledge from it or lack the ability to store that knowledge for future use. In either case the world would just look like a place full of random motions and events. It may be that some lower animals might go through life close to that way. Or it could be that we live in and have our consciousness in the present and old motions pass us and recede away into our past when they no longer interact with us and new motions come to us as part of our next present instant.
I was not talking about the measuring devices (sensors) in particular although that could also enter into the picture. I was talking about matter that existed (say a five pound block of iron) in the container. When that container and the five pound block of iron in it got down to absolute zero, the matter particles would still possess their fourth and fifth dimensional motions and the matter particles in the iron block would still be moving in the iron atoms, etc. so that even though all the electrons in the iron atoms would be in their lowest state so they would not generate any photons that could interact with a sensor in the container, there still would be a lot of motion going on inside of the matter in the iron block at absolute zero. The same would go for the matter in the sensor and the walls of the container even if they were both at absolute zero. These motions that would still exist were never originally intended to be considered in the concept of absolute zero. It was only intended to describe a condition where all free motion had been removed from the system so that no transmission of energy would occur from the place that was at absolute zero. Later some people said that there would still be some transmission away from the area at absolute zero due to matter decay. If you take this viewpoint, you would only truly be able to consider a place to be at absolute zero after all of the matter in it had decayed into energy and that energy had dissipated from that place or to say it in a different way only empty space could be at absolute zero. If you do not take this extreme viewpoint, however, the standard view of absolute zero leaves much motion in the system. It is just trapped local motion that cannot be transmitted externally.
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Paul N. Butler wrote on Nov. 28, 2008 @ 23:31 GMT
Narendra,
Sorry if you were offended by my comment. It was not aimed at the Indian civilization or any other particular civilization (you should see that I did not mention any particular civilization). It was merely a statement of fact that the name calling propaganda tactic is a very negative and destructive trait to a civilization and, therefore is a trait of a low level civilization...
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Narendra,
Sorry if you were offended by my comment. It was not aimed at the Indian civilization or any other particular civilization (you should see that I did not mention any particular civilization). It was merely a statement of fact that the name calling propaganda tactic is a very negative and destructive trait to a civilization and, therefore is a trait of a low level civilization that has not yet advanced to the point that it has been eliminated from use. In this world it goes back to very early primitive civilization structures even before the beginnings of the Indian civilization. In this world, it has been propagated to the present on the coat tails of other negative civil structures that have not been replaced because of their perceived value to the control structures in the system. The problem is that those who are in control of the civilization and its advancement are not necessarily interested in the advancement of the civilization as much as they are interested in maintaining their position of control and maximizing their preferential gain that comes from that position. They realize that if all people were educated so that they could intelligently analyze all incoming data such things as the name calling device would not be effective any more and would pass away, but to them this would be a negative thing because they would no longer be able to easily deceive people into believing that something that would selfishly take from the people (and transfer it to them in order for them to get more for themselves) would be a good thing for the people that took the loss. It is, in general therefore, perceived by them to be better for them to keep most of the people at a low level of intellectual ability so they can get what they want from them and maintain control over them. In general the more that a civilization encourages and acts in accordance to the truth the more advanced it is and the more equitable and better will be the lives of all the members of the civilization. The more that the civilization functions on the basis of using lies, deceit and brute force to control the population the less advanced (more primitive) that the civilization is. On the surface one could say that this device could be used to overcome a bad argument as well as a good one, but in practice it is usually used more to try to defend a bad (false) argument because a good argument can be better defended by use of logical arguments based on the truth since the good argument is based on the truth. When an argument is stating the truth, if others analyze it and find out that truth, it only strengthens the argument. If the argument is a lie, if others analyze it and find out that it is a lie, the argument is destroyed. The name calling device and other such devices that are used to distract others from actually analyzing the argument are, therefore, almost exclusively used to defend a faulty or inferior argument. This and other such devices have been responsible for the propagation of lack of advancement, strife and wars over protracted periods of time throughout man’s history and yet they have not been eliminated because they are supported by those that control the structure and see it in their advantage to continue their use. Since their use is so pervasive in the current world, people sometimes use them without thinking of what they are actually doing and the negative effects that can result. Civilization structuring is a vast subject and would require one to write a large book on it to even scratch the surface, but in the interest of saving your eyes from too much strain, I have tried to keep my answer as short as I could and still give enough detail so you could see that my statement was directed at the name calling device’s status in terms of its placement in the advancement of civilization as a trait associated with a low level civilization. The age of a civilization does not necessarily translate into advancement level. This is because negative traits in a civilization can stagnate and delay its advancement or even reverse previous advancement so I give age very little importance in evaluating a civilization’s advancement level. It would certainly please me for the knowledge of God’s love for man to be spread to all men. It would please me much more if after learning about God’s love all men would come to God and receive him and be joined into the body of Christ and be saved.
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John Merryman wrote on Nov. 29, 2008 @ 02:50 GMT
Paul,
I do take the extreme view of absolute zero. "Absolute" is not a subjective term. Energy and mass are interchangeable, so how do you have mass, yet say there is no energy?
I also push my religion to the limit, as well. To me, the default state, the absolute is "empty space," not a point. That's why I disagree with the fundamental assumption of both monotheism and Big Bang Theory. A point is a singularity, not the absolute. If you have one point, there is the potential for other points. As I see it, the points are effect and the fluctuation of the vacuum, the empty space, is the cause. Points are nodes in the network. They form as vortices of structure in this sea of virtual energy.
Good and bad are polarities. We are attracted to what holds our sense of self together and repelled by what breaks us apart, whether we are a chicken, a human, a government, or a religion. Do you think it is possible to have good without bad, anymore then it is possible to have up without down? We don't want our bodies to come apart, but they do. Whatever has a beginning has an end.
As for consciousness, I see it as something elemental, rather than a form which may be reincarnated. Not to say there might be some mental structures telegraphed through the generations, but my area of expertise is in dealing with animals and registering where their sense of self is focused. Also I have a teenaged daughter, so I've been educated about the Twilight series and vampires. Having that clue imbedded in my thinking, I've been noticing the concept being mentioned in various media as an analogy for the way that people plug into and feed of other's emotional space.
I think the essential point between physics and the psyche is whether structure or energy is more fundamental. As I've said, I see energy and information as two sides of the same coin, but our society is essentially based on structure as cause and energy as effect. In other words, nouns exist, verbs happen. Yet it seems the reality is the opposite. without the motion, there is no real physical basis. The "strings" are just external vibration and internal dimension.
As this applies to western monotheistic concepts, it seems our religions are determined to find the meaning in life, but the problem is that the concept of "meaning" is essentially static and reductionistic. What is left when all the "meaningless" chaff and extraneous details are blown and distilled away. Yet reality is wholistic and dynamic. No matter how much we postulate "block time" and "laws" it is still the motion and emotion which is the basis for all structure and knowledge. As individuals, we have purpose, or we cease to exist, as our energy and the hand of the clock moves on to other uses and others times. The information of our self falls into the past, as what is conscious moves into the future.
Paul N. Butler wrote on Dec. 1, 2008 @ 07:58 GMT
John,
I thought you might like that interpretation of absolute zero. You will probably like the next even more extreme idea about absolute zero as well and that is that absolute zero can never be achieved in any very large area of space or for any very long time if you believe in current quantum theory because of quantum fluctuations that would cause energy photons or matter particles to...
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John,
I thought you might like that interpretation of absolute zero. You will probably like the next even more extreme idea about absolute zero as well and that is that absolute zero can never be achieved in any very large area of space or for any very long time if you believe in current quantum theory because of quantum fluctuations that would cause energy photons or matter particles to just pop in and out of existence randomly in your test area. So if you believe in absolute zero as empty space and you also believe in current quantum theory, absolute is not an attainable concept to you, at least as far as temperature is concerned. I don’t say that I don’t have energy when I have mass. To me the true energy behind both mass and photons is motion. Both matter particles that possess rest mass due to the angular motion components caused by their fourth and fifth dimensional motions and photons that possess dynamic mass due to the angular motion components of their fourth vector motion possess the true energy of motion and these motions along with their motions in the first three dimensions define and generate these entities and their interactions. My point was that originally absolute zero generally meant to most people that there would be absolutely no free energy in the system, not that there would be no energy at all in the system. That is why temperature sensors designed to measure such low temperatures were designed to only sense free energy not the internal motions of mass structures. They do exactly what they are designed to do and no more. As you can see there are at least three different levels of meaning to the concept of absolute zero and if one uses that term and does not specify which one he means, it can lead to confusion. This is common with a lot of words in use today. That is why I will often give an example or say the same thing again using different words in order to try to better pass on to others the meaning that I am applying in my statement.
It looks like your default state or absolute of empty space cannot be attained or truly exist according to current theories. The points, however, apparently can exist and can even pop into existence randomly anywhere. They seem to have control over the empty space and can even destroy it by their appearance because when they appear the space is no longer empty. It has ceased to exist as empty space. Beside that, if the empty space is a sea of virtual energy is it really empty even when no particles have appeared in it? I do agree that the empty space came first and then the points (motions) were added later. That is because God created the basic dimensional system first that would store the motions and then added the motions later. I can understand your viewpoint on the big bang theory because it starts with a single point, but I do not see how you extrapolate that to the concept of one God. I have not seen anything that would suggest that God exists as a single point. It is often considered that he exists everywhere much like the empty space in terms of coverage of a large area. If it is that there is only one of him and that seems to you to be a problem, consider that the empty space is just one all pervasive entity also. If I am not seeing your point please explain it in more detail.
It seems possible to have just good or evil and not both. First since God made both good and evil as part of this creation to fulfill his purpose of creating a body for himself, so we could see the bad effects of evil first hand and be led to chose to do good instead of evil, if we learn and don’t do evil in the world to come, evil would no longer exist in practical terms. Another way that evil could be eliminated by God if he chose to do it that way would be for him to create the new world in such a way that anything we could do there would work for good and not evil. There could not be anything that was evil then because all things that we could do would be allowed and would not be evil as they would all work for good. It is also possible to have up and not have down in a world with monodirectional dimensions. People just limit themselves too much in their concepts. I have found that many of these thought limitations come from eastern religious philosophies that sound good on the surface, but have many logical inconsistencies with reality and logical thought extrapolations. It is true that in the world that we can observe, it seems that all things (including the world itself) have a beginning point and an end point of existence. It is also true though that each new beginning seems to be caused by something that is already in existence. If we extrapolate that back out to the beginning of the world, it would seem to suggest that something had to be in existence before our world in order to cause it to come into existence. Since the existence that caused our world to begin is not a part of our world, we would have no compelling evidence that the need for a beginning or an end that we see in our world would apply to that existence.
It is evident that the part of our minds that is made of matter and energy photons (the brain) is lost when we die as it breaks down after death. The spirit and the part of our soul that is not made of matter and energy may, however, continue to exist. In the scriptures those who are God’s people are raised from the dead at the second coming of Jesus Christ and live with him on this earth for one thousand years in reconstructed bodies. Later at the end of this world all the others are raised from the dead for the final judgment. This world is done away with and a new world replaces it. Those that are saved live with God in his body in the new world from then on. People and at least some of the higher animals do communicate to others by body language (the way they look at you, stance, etc.) things about how they feel, etc. I have not seen that movie or the concept in the media so I can’t comment on those things, as you did not give enough specifics.
The truth is that structure and energy are the different sides of the same coin of motion because both matter particles (your structure) and energy photons (your energy) are composed of the same more basic thing, which is motion. Both matter particles and energy photons contain information. Both contain information such as position, direction, and motion amplitude for each of their motions in the first four dimensions. Matter particles also contain the same information for their fifth dimensional motion. The most fundamental thing is the dimensional system because it not only contains the information that defines itself, but that information forms the framework that determines the specific needed information elements that each entity (motion) that exists within it must have in order to function fully and properly within it. It also contains the information that determines how the motions in the different dimensions work and interact together to form larger scale entities such as energy photons and matter particles.
Another word for meaning is information. It can be either static (within a dimension the part of its meaning that it is bi-directional remains the same) or dynamic (within a motion entity the part of its meaning that describes its direction within a bi-directional dimension can change). As an example, in a single dimension world a specific motion’s meaning is defined in a way that separates it from all other motions by its position, direction, and motion amplitude information (its meaning or information structure). To remove all meaning is to remove all existence. Reality is the complete combination of all meaning and is composed of all of the individual meaning or information entities that exist. Motion and emotion both are concepts composed of information or meaning. If you remove their meaning or information entities, they also cease to exist. According to the scriptures, God has given all of us purpose. As individuals we can choose to become members of his body (the best choice of purpose) and continue with him in the world to come or the choice can be made to not join the body, which is the same as choosing to be a part of the machinery that is used to make, prepare, and support the body members while they are in this world. At death the body dies and over time deteriorates and turns back into dust. The soul and spirit are stored in one of three places until they are resurrected in either the first or second resurrection. Those who are of God continue with him in his body in the new world. The others are destroyed. You are describing what those of this world can see because you cannot see or detect the soul or spirit. In this world all that is seen is the death of the body when the spirit leaves it. The spirit and soul and the places that they go to are not seen. Remember nothing can go into the future, as only the present really exists.
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John Merryman wrote on Dec. 1, 2008 @ 12:24 GMT
Paul,
I agree with you that the absolute state, as I've described it so far, cannot be attained, or we wouldn't be here having this conversation. There is another facet to the absolute though, which is that it is both nothing and everything. Both the empty state and all energy contained by it. The difference between this state of oneness and a set of one, is that if you were to separate out ANY part of this energy or space, neither the isolated part, or the rest would be absolute, but relational to what is measured. That is why I have problems with monotheism, is that it conflates the absolute state with the set of one. The set is a distinction, as you make clear, between what is included and what is excluded. The problem is that any shape, form, distinction, knowledge, relationship, etc. is based on this breaking of the absolute. When you insist it is possible to have this state of subjective perfection, where good can exist without bad, where pleasure can exist without pain, where up can exist without down, you create hubris. As the old saying goes, the perfect is enemy of the good. We have to have movement, yet it needs to keep some perspective of the opposing elements, the blowback, in mind. There is no happy medium, as that is the flatline on the heart monitor. The absolute as nothing. So in order to feel, the price we pay is that some of it is pain.
Paul N. Butler wrote on Dec. 2, 2008 @ 09:33 GMT
John,
How do you perceive this energy to be generated or if it is always there how is it hidden at times and seen at other times? What is the mechanism behind it (its structure and interaction rules or that which determines when it manifests itself and in what form)? You seem to be suggesting that this empty space/energy state exists, but that it should just be accepted as fact without...
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John,
How do you perceive this energy to be generated or if it is always there how is it hidden at times and seen at other times? What is the mechanism behind it (its structure and interaction rules or that which determines when it manifests itself and in what form)? You seem to be suggesting that this empty space/energy state exists, but that it should just be accepted as fact without attempting to understand it and how it works, because to do so would be to break it into parts and you would then not have the whole any more, but only the parts. There is the concept that the whole is the sum of the parts, so that if you can understand all of the parts and how they work together in the whole, you can then understand the whole. Even if you say the whole can be more than the sum of its parts, learning about the parts and how they work and interact can get one closer to understanding the whole. This is how most science is done. It may then be possible to work with the whole to learn the rest. That is not to say that one cannot start with observing the whole and learn of it and how it works from that end also. That is usually how I work. It seems to me that if you join the absolute of empty space (the maximum state of nothing) with the absolute of all energy (the maximum state of all things) into one, you have by definition broken both of the absolutes (empty space and energy) and what you get is a non absolute combination of the two rather than an absolute of oneness. If the empty space contains the something of energy it is no longer empty space because it contains something and if energy contains empty space it is no longer the state of absolute energy because it now contains empty space where no energy can exist. Our world works this way in that you have some areas that can be called empty space and some areas that contain much material substance and energy and all of the variations in between those two states. You seem to be fixated on the extremes when the real world works in the middle ground of the combination of the extremes in most cases. The true joining together of empty space and energy into one entity that combines the two while allowing the two to still exist as absolutes is not possible because the two contain mutually exclusive properties. The presence of one destroys the absoluteness of the other because the absoluteness of one is the absence of the other. Empty space is the absence of energy because space with energy in it is not empty, as an example. If you are just saying that the oneness is the universe as a whole and, therefore, includes both the empty space and all the energy (motion) within it then I can agree that it could possibly be considered a state of oneness or of an existence as a whole. Within the universe, it is not that the two exist completely joined, but at the same time completely separate absolutes. Instead they are joined together and work together in many ways to generate all the complexity of the structure of our world by giving up their absolute conditions. Again, you could conceive of a world in which one half of the space is completely empty and the other half is completely filled with a uniform level of energy throughout it with a separation between the two areas so there could be no interaction between the two. You would then have a world that contained both the absolute of empty space and the absolute of energy, but it would be a very uninteresting world to live in as nothing would be happening. You have pointed out all of these dualities and there are many in this world. What I am pointing out is that the real interesting part of existence (where all the action is) is generally not at the absolute extremes of the dualities, but in the middle between the extremes where the two opposites of the duality join together to generate the entities that make up our world. It is the breaking of the absolutes that generates reality. There are things in our world, of course, that do not exhibit dualities. Electromagnetism contains the duality of both attraction and repulsion, but gravity only exhibits attraction. The fact that some things exist that do not express duality shows that duality is not a requirement of existence. The next consideration is whether things that do express duality could have been made in such a way that they could exist without the duality. I have already demonstrated that it would be possible to do so. With mono-directional dimensions in which you could only travel one way down the dimension it would be possible to remove the duality of up and down. In a three dimensional world made of such dimensions, instead of in and out, left and right, up and down, you might have in, right, and up, but there would be no opposites because you could not travel down the dimensions the other way. Those dualities would not exist in such a world. If the megaverse/landscape theory was true, there would likely be many worlds out there somewhere that did not contain the same dualities as those in our world and probably some that would not contain any dualities in their construction. You are right that in the beginning before God created the world he existed as the absolute set of one. It was by the breaking off of a part of himself (breaking the absolute) and using that separated part to create the world that he was able to create the shapes, forms, distinctions, knowledge, and relationships that exist in the world. I have already demonstrated that not all things in this world possess opposite dualities. I also demonstrated that at least some dualities that exist in this world could have been avoided by constructing the world in a different way. Because we see so many things in this world that possess opposite duality properties it is easy to think that there is no other way that things could have been done, but this is not really true. Dualities are useful, as they produce choices. If God had not created both Good and evil, it would not have been possible for us to choose his way (the good) or some other opposite way (the evil). It suited his purpose to have that duality in the world so that he could show us the bad results of not following his (good) way. His desire is not that we be in the middle in that duality both doing good and bad, but that we learn how bad the evil really is and that we then grow up and learn to do just the good and not the bad. In this particular duality the absolute of good is what is desirable. The opposite absolute of bad and the middle ground are not the acceptable positions to be in. In reality, however God says that we can not obtain that absolute by ourselves. We can only obtain it by God keeping us from temptations and keeping us from doing evil. He does promise to do that for us under certain conditions. In those that are God’s the duality of good and evil disappears because his people only do the good so the manifestation of the evil disappears. In the world to come where all the people that remain are God’s people, evil would effectively be eliminated by the fact that no one would make the bad choice. My intent is not to be insolent or arrogant and pride or passion has nothing to do with what I am saying. I am just making observations of the world and the scriptures and extrapolating them out to logical conclusions. There are many old sayings. Some are good and some are not or are of limited use. In your example saying, if the perfect and the good are one and the same they are friends not enemies. We live in this world and in it are many dualities that have aspects that are bad to us. They are there because God made them so we could learn how to make the best choices. If all of the people in the world only made the best choices many of the negative dualities would effectively disappear from our observation because their negative effects are the result of bad choices being made. It is reasonable that after we have learned our lessons from this world, so that we make the right choices, we may no longer need some or all of those choices to be available to us in the world to come, so the new world may be made with different dualities. Not all dualities have good and bad opposites. You can have your tea hot or cold, but as long as you like it both ways the opposites can both be good to you. Although I have given you one case where an absolute is the good choice (good better than evil), most of the world is composed in that medium between absolutes where they work together to generate structure in that the opposing absolutes create a stable equilibrium of motions that compose all of the energy and matter entities that exist in our world. In that case it is the absolutes of the outward motions of the first four dimension’s motions counteracted by the inward motion of the fifth dimension’s motion that generate all the structure of matter that is such an important part of our existence in this world. In that case it is the absolutes of either just the outward motion or just the inward motion without the other that creates the flat line dead world. So to sum it all up, God made some of the dualities so he could use them in the construction of the world. Others he made so we could make choices and learn to make the best choices. In some cases the middle ground choice is used by God or given as the best choice to us. In other cases an absolute choice is used by God or given to us as the best choice. In some cases God works without using dualities at all, but only allows one choice or path to follow.
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John Merryman wrote on Dec. 2, 2008 @ 18:01 GMT
Paul,
You do a good job of expressing the difficulties in describing the conceptual extreme of the absolute. Though I would argue to separate energy from the vacuum would be a distinction and negate the absolute. The absolute is the universal state. Since energy is neither gained or lost by it, there is no transfer of energy. When you make distinctions within this state, they are relational to each side of the distinction, not to some outer standard. Even if you isolate a very small part of the infinity as the point of reference, then all of infinity is relative to that reference. Using gravity as an example of a singular polarity may be dangerous to your argument if an opposing polarity were discovered. Essentially Einstein postulated the Cosmological Constant as the opposite polarity to gravity and dark energy has been measured to fit within this model, as a potential Cosmological Constant. You argue it is possible to have motion in one direction without necessarily having motion in the other direction. While it may be possible your point of reference only moves in one direction and never goes the other direction, how do you reference it? There has to be some broader field of reference which is effectively moving in the opposite direction of your point of reference. It's like saying the sun only moves one direction around the earth, but the fact is the earth rotates the opposite direction.
Many of the most evil people in history, Hitler and Stalin come to mind, succeeded at what they did, not because they committed those crimes personally, but because they convinced the people around them that there was only one way to go and therefore anyone who got in their way must be wrong. We are inherently attracted to what is beneficial and repelled by what is detrimental, but reality is complicated and what might be good from one perspective, is bad from another. Our current economic paradigm of unlimited growth for everyone on earth is a good example of short term benefit and long term disaster. Government economic policies which mitigate economic swings are an example of trying to balance these counteracting effects.
To me there are two sides of this reality, the expanding, entangled radiant energy and the collapsing discrete structured order. So even though this discrete gravitational mass seems particlized, it is still composed of and contained within the energy field, just as those relative distinctions exist within the absolute. So reality is this field of energy, of which structure is condensing out of, just as the order of the past collapses out of the complexity of the present, with the chaos of the future providing the wave of potential, as the expanding energy must collapse in order to keep the cycle going, yet all within the universal field.
Paul N. Butler wrote on Dec. 4, 2008 @ 04:33 GMT
John,
Thank you. I notice that you now have substituted the concepts of the empty state/space with vacuum. This is an important distinction because although it originally had the same connotation in the past as empty space, the concept of the vacuum is now not generally considered the same as empty space. In the present context it would be more appropriate to consider the vacuum as an...
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John,
Thank you. I notice that you now have substituted the concepts of the empty state/space with vacuum. This is an important distinction because although it originally had the same connotation in the past as empty space, the concept of the vacuum is now not generally considered the same as empty space. In the present context it would be more appropriate to consider the vacuum as an all pervasive something (your energy) than as nothing. If you want to consider the space involved you could call it filled space rather than empty space because it would be filled with that energy. If all of space was filled with such energy the concept of empty space would disappear because it would not be possible to actually have any empty space. So there would not be any dualism in this case. You would be left with only the absolute state of all space filled with the all pervasive energy with no opposite alternative absolute. From that point it would only be a matter of whether a particular area of space was filled with this energy in a form that we cannot detect or with the energy in a form such as photons or matter particles that we can detect. From that state, in order for the concept to have any practical application you would then need to define how this energy would change to generate photons and matter particles, etc. Ideally you would show how this production can be controlled to generate desired results such as to form a new car for you to use, or to produce propulsion for your space ship etc. You would also need to define any interactions that photons and matter particles, etc. could have with the energy in its other undetectable form as they traveled through it. As far as the danger of discovery of opposing forces to gravity destroying my argument are concerned, I should say that so far in this very early experimental phase of information transfer, I have kept all of the information that has been presented within a vary narrow dispersion angle to man’s present technology understandings. This means that I have of necessity presented concepts and used examples that are incomplete in their depth. In some cases I have used examples that make it easier to transfer the basic concepts that do not, however, actually represent the true reality of how the thing exists in reality. I have done this for two reasons. First it is often much easier to begin to present a concept in a way that avoids many of the more difficult areas of the subject. This is done to keep the material within the acceptable dispersion angle so it has some chance of being accepted by the desired audience. The second reason is to avoid giving information that is beyond that level which is acceptable to give at this time. You may have noticed that I did give a simplified example of a possible interface structure between the first three dimensions and the fourth dimension in my paper, but I only gave a relatively vague description of the effects caused by the fifth dimensional interface, as an example. There are many places and things that exist in the creation that man is currently completely unaware of, even within the acceptable range of currently allowable advancement in fourth vector structuring technology, so if I began to attempt to discuss these things it would appear to others as too far out to believe. If the information is given in small amounts, with time for each amount to be incorporated into present knowledge so that new things will be discovered, then the next more advanced amount if information will not seem so far out because the new discoveries will prepare the minds to receive it within their then larger context of understanding. It will then be understood that the examples that were only in part or in some cases were even not completely according to reality were just vehicles to gently move the mind from a state of a great error to the truth through a series of lesser and lesser errors or generalizations. I would guess that if these experiments do not generate any direct fruit, but at the same time if this material is somehow preserved for access to those in the future, it would likely cause those that read it a couple hundred years from now to on the one hand wonder how I knew some of the things that I am presenting and on the other hand they would wander how it would be that some of the things presented would indicate a lack of in depth knowledge and even a perceived belief in erroneous concepts. If this section is preserved, however, it may be less confusing to them. Then they will just wander how much I really did know. Sub energy effects and the effects that lower fifth vector structural levels have on our level are greatly responsible for perceived dark energy effects. It is true, however, that there are exceptions to many of the scientific beliefs that are currently believed to be true. It is possible using advanced fifth vector structuring technology, for example, to transfer (travel) to a planet in a distant galaxy within a single structural frequency cycle of the particles that are transferred. It is even possible using alternate cycle transfers (or more advanced methods) to effectively be both there and here at the same time. The same technology can be used to transfer energy from a distant star to earth to in effect provide what would be looked at by today’s usage standards to be a limitless supply of energy. The resulting excess low level energy can be transferred away from earth into space to preserve the planet’s ambient energy level to be within acceptable limits by the same technique. All of these things violate the present belief of the maximum transfer rate as the speed of light. They take advantage of variations in size and distance through multiple structural levels that are not yet understood by man in this world. A world constructed using mono-directional dimensions would certainly be a much different place to live in (if life would be possible) than this world. It would have many limitations that we do not have. We should be thankful that God was wise enough and benevolent enough to us to use bi-directional dimensions to give us a better place to live than that. In such a world rotary motion would not be possible because it requires motions in opposite directions. In order to rotate, parts of the earth must move in one direction in a dimension while other parts must move in the opposite direction in the same dimension.
It is true that those who are evil tend to spread that evil to others if they can. It is also true that we tend to look at those things that are pleasant to us as good and those things that are unpleasant to us as bad. Part of the problem that we have as individuals is the lack of a true global perspective of how our actions affect the world as a whole both now in the present and also in the long term. The only true global perspective can be obtained by someone that can at least observe the whole structure and has determined all the details of how it works. The only one who has this perspective is the one that created the whole structure and that is God. When God says that we should do something (the good) or that we should not do something (the evil or bad) it is not because that will give us the most immediate pleasure. It is because it is what will work the best for all of us both now and in the long run based on how he knows that the world that he created works. Without the global perspective that God gives, man is destined to destroy himself. This is mainly due to the fact that man by himself not only has a lack of understanding of what the long term effects of his actions will be, he also has built in laws that will cause him (if he does not receive the other information from God to change his actions) to be willing to cause even great suffering to others in order for him to gain even a small amount of pleasure for himself. As an example, God has created the world so that we have limited lifetimes in this world because this world is meant to prepare us for a better life in another better world as members of his body. We, therefore, do not need an eternal existence in this world any more than a car needs to remain forever in the factory where it was produced, neither is it truly desirable to have such, as our condition is better once we leave here if we become members of God’s body. In order to continue the process of making more body members he has made us so that we have children that can become the next body members after we leave this world. It is his intent that as a part of our preparation to become body members, we take care of the children and bring them up to be prepared to become the next body members. Because it is a lot of work to properly raise children he has provided that two people a man and a woman are required to have a child and has commanded that they join together in a lifelong commitment of marriage to each other to allow the burden of raising the children to not be too great. He has also commanded that no one engage in sexual relations with any one other than that one’s spouse so that unwanted children will not be brought into the world resulting in them not being properly taken care of. Each generation first gains the benefit of being taken care of by their parents when they are young and then returns that benefit to the next generation by taking care of their own children later. If we do these things according to his will everything works alright because we are working in agreement with the way that the world is structured to work. Without God as the guide, however, each individual will do things according to his local perspective colored by his desire to mainly only consider his own gain without regard to how others are affected. What tends to happen is that an individual will think of sexual relations as good under all conditions because of the pleasure gained from the act. The long term results such as unwanted children being brought into the world or the increased spread of diseases from having multiple partners, will not be considered because the gain perverts the person’s judgment (God says that a gift (gain) perverts judgment (this is why scams always offer a promise of a gain to the sucker)). Each person goes into the act looking only for selfish pleasure and not for any true relationship with the other person. If a disease is contracted the person will likely rationalize that it is still ok to continue to have relations with others even though the result is to pass the disease on to them also. If the result is a child the man will likely rationalize away his part in making the child and feel no obligation to take care of the child. This leaves the mother to take care of the child alone, which is a great burden for one person to do and not possible for one person to do properly unless she is wealthy. In order to continue to have their pleasure and not have to bear the burden of properly taking care of the unwanted children they are likely to decide that it is good to kill the children so they won’t have to take care of them. This, of course is not good to the children, but they are not in a position to do anything about it so they must just suffer the loss of their lives for the selfish pleasure of their parents. When the concept that it is not wrong to take a life in order to assure one’s pleasure becomes established, it is easy to see why a woman would not consider it wrong to throw the child in the trash after it is born to escape the work of raising the child. This principle will then spread to other areas as well. It will be reasoned that those who are crippled or too old to take care of themselves should be killed to save all the labor that goes into caring for them. Later it will get to the point that those on top will consider only those who give them gain will be worthy to live. At some point the whole system breaks down in chaos and no one gets much pleasure as they fight to just survive. This is the difference between following God’s global perspective (the one who designed the system) and man’s self oriented limited local perspective. It is not wrong to attempt to help those who are in need around the world to get to where they are able to take care of themselves and to take care of the ones that can’t take care of themselves. The problem is that the intent is not to truly give all people the best lives they can have, but only to give those on top the best lives that they can have by shifting most resources to them while giving every one else less. This can only be done for so long and then the lower and middle class people get so much in debt that they cannot pay so once again the system breaks down into a depression. God has provided a way for man to live so that all have enough resources to have a good life. Current government economic policies tend to work to consolidate wealth in the hands of the wealthy while removing it from the others so that they must continue to work and work harder generally for less in return.
What is the mechanism that causes a matter particle to condense out of the energy field? How is some of the field changed into a matter particle? What is the structural difference between the energy field and the matter particle? What causes the expanding energy field to expand in the first place and what then causes it to contract? If the universal field is not the same as the energy field, what does it do? Is it static or does it expand and contract along with the energy field, etc.? Does it generate the energy field or matter particles or act upon them in any way or is it just a medium in which they exist? The past has no order as it does not really exist except in our minds. The future also does not really exist except in our minds so it does not have chaos.
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John Merryman wrote on Dec. 7, 2008 @ 01:13 GMT
Paul,
I've been meaning to reply to the above post, but work, family and the flood of other submissions has consumed whatever time I have.
As for the distinction between empty space and the vacuum, it seems the energy filling this space is balanced between positive and negative. Matter and anti-matter. So it's like a point I may have raised previously, that zero isn't a point between 1 and -1, as it is the absence of any point, but with the potential for any point, ie, empty space. It's like the nadir of a swinging pendulum is the point where it swings fastest from one side to the other, but is still drawn to.. While effectively being nothing, it has the greatest degree of freedom, as definition is limitation and limitation is definition. Like the line from the old song, Me and Bobbie Magee, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to loose."
This also has to do with how we live and perceive our lives. Like the pendulum, when it seems we have traveled so long in one direction that it seems the only way to go, but the situation is slowed, we wait for things to pick up again. Sometimes though, the inconceivable is happening and we are going to start going the other direction. I think this applies to some of our scientific, political, religious and economic assumptions. With so much change dominating our lives, time seems linear, but for most of life, it is cyclical.
Narendra wrote on Dec. 8, 2008 @ 03:53 GMT
Reread with devotion the long postings of Paul and John and some others again. i am wiser about the nature of the world and the humans who inhabit it. Learning is life but we need to assimilate the same to be good in our actions towards the society around and the world at large. We tend to solve some problems in science ( it is true for personal lives too ) and new ones arise, it is a never ending business to make our life interesting. Let us all enjoy the opportunity this essay contest have provided. The organizers may have a tough time digesting all the contents of over 150 essays and thousands of postings!
Paul N. Butler wrote on Dec. 8, 2008 @ 06:43 GMT
John,
I understand that we all have other things that we need to do in life. Next to some other ways of serving God, taking care of the family is the most important thing to do in life.
It would seem to me that if space is the balance between matter and anti-matter, the matter and anti-matter must exist in other places that both feed into our space and if the amount of...
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John,
I understand that we all have other things that we need to do in life. Next to some other ways of serving God, taking care of the family is the most important thing to do in life.
It would seem to me that if space is the balance between matter and anti-matter, the matter and anti-matter must exist in other places that both feed into our space and if the amount of matter that feeds a certain area of space is equal to (balances with) the amount of anti-matter that feeds the same area of space the result in that area of space is empty space. What are these places where the matter and anti-matter exist and how do they interact with our space? It would also seem that if matter and anti-matter came together, the result would be that they would cancel out leaving only empty space, but in reality when matter and anti-matter meet the matter and anti-matter are converted into energy photons and not empty space. Only that portion of the entities that gives them their rest mass and allows them to remain in one place is cancelled out (their fifth dimensional motion (anti-matter’s motion travels in the opposite direction in the fifth dimension compared to that of matter, so the opposite angular components of the two entities are canceled out and the fifth dimensional motions are transferred back into the fourth dimension causing the entities to become photons)). Although the state of being of nothing could be looked upon as the ultimate state of freedom because there are no limiting rules of definition to constrain the nothing, the lack of existence that comes from being in that state is really the ultimate restriction of action, because nothing can do nothing. Definition (information) actually creates things that an entity can be and do. The true ultimate freedom would be to contain all possible information so that we could know and do all things without limitation. We could make all possible choices and have all possible abilities, so we would always be able to make the right or most appropriate decision and take the best action for any situation. We see this in our everyday lives. The more information that we gain about ourselves and the world around us as we grow up from an infant to fully grown individuals, the more freedom we gain to allow us to control our lives. As an example a person might say that as a man you are limited by your definition (the rules that make you up (your internal information)), so that you are limited such that you can’t fly. In reality it is a lack of information that causes you to not be able to fly. If your definition included that you had large enough and strong enough wings you would be able to fly. It could even include the ability to generate enough gas to allow you to be jet powered in your flight.
That is a good point because we do live in a world with many repetitive cycles. Science is greatly dependent on repetitive cycles because the scientific method is based on observations and the results of tests that can be repeated. Valid scientific laws and relationships are generally based on such repetitive cycles. In science the presence of repetitive cycles in theoretical concepts, however, is often an indication of a lack of understanding of the true nature in reality of the concept, relationship, or entity that is explained by the theory. A good example of this is the wave/particle concept of energy. At various times in the past such energy has been considered to exist as a wave, while at other times it has been believed to be a particle. In more recent times the two concepts have been somewhat joined together, but the underlying structure that generates both effects is still not for the most part greatly understood by man in this world. When one understands the fourth dimension, its interface with the first three dimensions, and how an entity's motion in the fourth dimension affects how the entity appears to us, it becomes apparent that it is truly neither a wave or a solid billiard ball type particle, but a much more complex variable structure in the lower three dimensions. Political cycles are more visible in countries like the United States where the visible rulers are replaced every few years, often by those that express great differences in beliefs from the ones that they replace. This does not mean, however, that such apparent cycles are not used by those with wealth and power to further their agendas by doing those things that are a part of their agenda that fit into the part of the cycle that they are in at the time. In the same way variations in economic cycles can be generated and used to make changes to further such agendas. In religion, one of the major overall cycles starts when God selects a people to be his (usually a downtrodden or mistreated group). He builds them up and gives them great wealth, power and many other benefits. Once they become rich and powerful, etc., however, they think that they no longer need God, so they leave him and go off and worship false gods or deny his existence completely. God then takes away their riches, power and other benefits that he gave them and puts them under the power of others that misuse them again. At some point when life gets bad enough, they cry out to God to deliver them from the ones that are treating them badly and the cycle starts over again. Man never seems to learn from past experience to avoid repeating the cycle by staying with God. Of course, some individuals do learn that lesson and stay with God and in the long run we all leave this world as individuals not as composite groups, so God’s purpose is accomplished any way. The last forty to fifty years in the United States is a good example of this cycle in action, although the cycle has not yet quite completed. There have been a few cases where a good ruler comes in and brings the people back to God, so the people escape the cycle for a period of time at least while that leader is in power, so there is always the possibility to avoid the suffering if the people repent and return to God before the punishment comes. I would not bet on that happening now in this case though. It is true that the long periods and slow cycle rates of many cyclical motions in this world make it difficult to observe, recognize, and understand many of the cycles that exist here, especially the more complex ones, such as the one mentioned above, but if one knows what to look for they can still be seen. We can only recognize such cycles because we can record present motion conditions and then later look back through them to see the repetitive patterns that exist in them.
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John Merryman wrote on Dec. 8, 2008 @ 18:35 GMT
Narendra,
Thanks for the compliments.
Yes, we do seem to wander off the subject of time, though it all ties together at a fundamental level.
Paul,
I hadn't thought in terms of matter/antimatter stored in other dimensions, though this seems to be the dimension with the preponderance of matter over anti-matter. I've wondered whether matter/anti-matter isn't somehow...
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Narendra,
Thanks for the compliments.
Yes, we do seem to wander off the subject of time, though it all ties together at a fundamental level.
Paul,
I hadn't thought in terms of matter/antimatter stored in other dimensions, though this seems to be the dimension with the preponderance of matter over anti-matter. I've wondered whether matter/anti-matter isn't somehow tied up in positive and negative polarities and thus bound up in the nature of mass. You do bring it back to this space by pointing out they both bounce out as light. That makes sense to me, as I tend to view light(expansion) as the opposite of mass(contraction).
I also understand nothing would be no freedom, since it would be nothing, but the idea is that zero isn't the dimensionless point, since that is something, even if it is virtual. If you just had two points, you wouldn't describe one as zero and the other as one. They would two separate points. One point can be designated the zero, but the only inherent neutral position would be midway between the two points and that would be a third point! Since one point can't be zero, than zero has to be empty. As in the potential for any point, anywhere. Even those which don't exist. What you can't escape is the notion of space, not as some form of "fabric" of frame, but the complete absence of any absolute reference. So space is the essence of non-being, just as matter and energy are the essence of being.
As for the freedom of definition, the description you use is a function of time, that as we grow and can make more informed decisions, the more options are open to us, but the fact remains that as we make these decisions, the alternatives are lost to us. As well as the alternatives presented by the alternatives. When we chose one fork in the road, not only do we not explore the road not taken, but have no knowledge of the options it might provide. It's like the old saying that the more we know, the more we know that we don't know.
With your description of how God operates you show the conceptual limits to the model. What you are describing is a convective cycle, as it is expressed in human activity. When those at the bottom have the energy, the direction and the opportunity, they rise up and expand, just as hot water rises up and expands though cool water, thus cooling down so that it eventually sinks as more hot water rises up. Whether it's geology, or geopolitics, the pattern holds. As an example, look at Israel. For millennia the Jewish people have been under pressure and directed this energy to creating a strong and resilient culture, much like pressure turns carbon into diamond. Then after the holocaust, they saw the opportunity to rise up and claim their piece of ground. Now they are on top and it's the Palestinians who are under pressure and the Jews who have to reconcile their history of oppression with their current situation of colonization. The problem for the Muslims is that for its first thousand years, Islam was extremely successful at providing a cultural network to pre-modern peoples, as well as collapsing ancient cultures. Whereas Christianity and Judaism were formed as much by their struggles as their successes. So now that Islam has cooled off and been submerged by western technology, it doesn't have the organizational flexibility to respond and resorts to isolation and anger. These religious models seem ancient to us, but in the vast span of human evolution, they are a stage. By defining and limiting this concept of God to the top of the cycle, it creates an unstable and confusing situation. It is a natural societal function to look up to a particular leader and since any one individual is mortal, to create an ideal of leadership to which everyone can respect, no matter who fills that position. It's essential to a functioning group structure. The problem is by isolating that position from the larger process on which it is based creates instability, since those at the top, if they are not viewed as gods themselves, as the ancient Egyptians viewed Pharaohs, then they were viewed as representatives of God, or otherwise anointed by him. So that rather than being the leaders of society, they became the purpose of society. No matter how idealized or incorporeal the deity is modeled as, it still reinforces a social model based on a reductionistic ideal. Since this is generally an adult, or old male, it became a monopole, where all that otherwise balanced that particular concept were effectively impure. This especially applied to women, as well as youth. It should also be noted that Jesus wasn't trying to start a new religion, since he was a monotheist and that would amount to the worst form of heresy. Rather he was trying to reform Judaism. To push the reset button and clear away all the decay and corruption that had built up in it. He might have turned the other cheek to his enemies, but he took a stick to the money changers. The problem is that God as the father does represent the past, as the father is the previous generation. So how do you reset the father, other then by replacing him. The king is dead. Long live the king. It's the cycle at work. The fact is that our parents start as the model we follow, but eventually they become the foundation we rise from. God can't just be at the top of the cycle, but must be at the bottom as well. The start of the journey, not just the finish. Otherwise we end up idolizing what is old and encrusted and that only serves to empower the status quo. So it isn't surprising the religion of the establishment should be formulated around worshiping an old man up on a throne.
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John Merryman wrote on Dec. 8, 2008 @ 18:46 GMT
And sheer irony that it now takes the form of the sacrificed son.
Revolution co-opted.
Paul N. Butler wrote on Dec. 9, 2008 @ 06:46 GMT
Narendra,
I am pleased if you have gained any knowledge, wisdom, or understanding from that which I or for that matter others have provided here. Believe me, the survival of man in this world has already been provided for (for as long as this world is needed to fulfill God’s purpose) though all may not yet know it. Those from anywhere and at any level that aid in God’s work shall be rewarded and those who work against it will receive an undesirable end result at the proper time. These things have already been decided from above and cannot be changed. My intent at this point in this world is to try to not only provide the opportunity for man to experience a better life in this world by providing information that if received and used in the right way can provide for man’s needs in the future and open up new opportunities for man to advance and at the proper time to expand to new societal connections with others, but to also do what I can to help others to be able to have a part in the endless life that is available in the world that will replace this one. I do not offer to solve all problems whether scientific or in personal lives. I will only provide the basic information that can be extrapolated into a new level of understanding through the labor of many, in the case of scientific knowledge, and through the labor of each individual that willingly receives it, in the case of knowledge of God. It is always up to each individual to decide how to react to these and other things, so that all things may be rightly judged at the proper time. New problems will always arise while we are in this world as part of our instruction and for other purposes. I do appreciate the opportunity that those who have created this contest have provided to allow this experiment to be carried out and I am sure that it will result in much useful information to me in my continued endeavors to fulfill my purpose here. It is true that the large number of papers that were entered in the last few days will likely make it difficult for the judges to properly analyze all of them and come up with a well reasoned judgment as to which ones should receive which awards. May God help them in that endeavor.
Paul N. Butler wrote on Dec. 11, 2008 @ 06:38 GMT
John,
You are right that matter and antimatter are opposites. They are not truly opposite polarities, but opposite directions of motion in the fifth dimension. The fifth dimensional motion of an entity creates angular motion components that cause the entity to take a curved path in the lower three dimensions due to the specific type of interface that exists between the fifth dimension and...
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John,
You are right that matter and antimatter are opposites. They are not truly opposite polarities, but opposite directions of motion in the fifth dimension. The fifth dimensional motion of an entity creates angular motion components that cause the entity to take a curved path in the lower three dimensions due to the specific type of interface that exists between the fifth dimension and the lower three dimensions. With matter these angular motion components cause the entity to travel in a curved path in one direction while in antimatter the opposite direction angular components cause the entity to take a curved path that travels in the opposite direction. When these two entities (one matter and one antimatter) come together the interaction that occurs causes the angular components to be canceled out. As a result the motion that had been stored in the fifth dimension in both entities is transferred back into their fourth dimensional motions and without the fifth dimensional motion that caused the entities to take a curved path, the entities travel in a straight-line path as energy photons. The fifth dimension is the place that stores that motion of an entity that determines whether that entity is an energy photon (fifth dimensional motion equals zero), a matter particle (fifth dimensional motion equals greater than zero in one direction, or an antimatter particle (fifth dimensional motion equals greater than zero in the opposite direction. You are right in connecting matter’s and antimatter’s opposite properties to mass because it is the angular motion components in the lower three dimensions that are generated by the entity’s fifth dimensional motion that are responsible for most of a matter or antimatter particle’s mass/inertia effect. It is the fifth dimensional motion of a particle that determines whether it is light (expansion) or mass (contraction).
I agree with you that even a dimensionless point is something. Even a zero dimension world would contain one dimensionless point and that would be something. It would represent an identifiable point as the only place in that world. As you point out one of two points could be designated as zero and this is where perspective comes into play. If you were at one of the points and you wanted to travel to the other point you might call the point that you were at zero to signify that it is the beginning point (the zero point) in your travel, as you have traveled a zero amount of distance while you remain at that point. The way that the world is constructed, any absolute reference points that might exist are hidden to us because of our lack of a global perspective. In the framework of our local perspective we are left with choosing a specific point as our reference point that suits the need at hand. The fact that we can choose any point in space and isolate it from any other point in space by coordinates that connect the two points whether the points contain any energy or matter or is just empty, tells us that points in space do have an existence outside of energy and matter and that the three dimensional coordinate system that we use also has some basis in reality. The actual coordinate names that we use and measurement units that are used are man made constructs that point to inherent properties of the structure of the space that does have an existence because it contains those properties (information). As an example, the fact that any point in the space that we see around us can be identified by three coordinates is a property of the space that remains regardless of how (in which direction) we lay out the coordinates. There is an underlying structure to the empty space that generates this property (the ability to identify any point in visible space with three coordinates). Since space itself contains this property it must therefore have an existence in itself in order to be able to contain any property (information). When you gave an example of the mid point between two points as the zero point you were generating a local one-dimensional coordinate system. You can also generate a two dimensional coordinate system in visible space where the zero point is the point at which two perpendicular lines meet. A three dimensional coordinate system can also be generated as the place where three lines that are all perpendicular to each other meet at the zero point. You cannot, however, generate in our visible space a coordinate system where four lines that are all perpendicular to each other meet at the zero point. Even though we cannot see absolute directions to lay out all coordinate systems in, we do have direct evidence that the world is constructed in such a way that our visible space can only support coordinate systems of three or less dimensions. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that our visible empty space is laid out in a dimensional system that contains three dimensions. Points of empty space do not just come into existence when matter or energy comes into those points, but continually exist and are laid out in relation to each other and also in relation to those points that contain matter or energy particles. If they did not exist we would not see any distance of empty space between the earth and the moon because if all of the points of empty space between the earth and the moon did not exist there could be no space between the two. So, empty space has its essence of being as the place that contains the points that can contain energy or matter entities. By adding enough points between existing points it is possible to think of an analog continuum instead of individual points if you like that better.) It generally performs two important functions in reality. First, it is the place where energy and matter entities can exist and second, it provides the places of separation between such particles. The amount or quantity of empty space between two particles is every bit as important to the generation of our reality as the particles are themselves. Basically, space is the container that can contain the motions that make up matter and energy entities. Because all points in our visible space can be identified by three coordinates, we can see that this container is formed in at least three dimensions. Space, therefore, either has structure or form of itself or it exists as the output of some other underlying structure. It has not been proven that space does not have any absolute reference, but only that within the realm of our limited local perspective we do not see any such absolute reference.
You are right that when we choose and go down one of two alternative paths it can make it difficult or imposable to retrace our steps and go down the other path and that because of our limited local perspective we can not always determine by ourselves the best path to choose the first time. In my example, I was pointing out that if we had a true global perspective we would see all paths and where they would all lead and could make the best choice at any juncture so that everything would always work for the best. That is why I have found it best to follow the only one who has the true global perspective. Generally though even with our limited local perspective, experience has shown that looking at the options and going down the path that we determine to be the best path in the light of that limited local perspective is better than doing nothing. A child that decides to go down the path to try to learn how to walk could fall down and hit his head and die as a result, but in reality only a few suffer from that result and most learn how to walk, which opens up whole new areas of possibilities to explore to make life much more interesting to live. On the other hand the child that never tries to walk will much more likely suffer a bad end result. If one keeps his mind open to examine the results of going down each path that he chooses to travel in, it can many times become evident that the path is a dead end or will lead to a bad result before one has gone too far down the path, so that a change in path can be made to a better one. This can be a hard ability to learn because our minds are made in such a way as to encourage us to continue in the same old familiar paths by generating paths in our minds that bypass the normal processing that we would otherwise do to determine the best path to take. Instead an input automatically goes through the path without our thinking of it in terms of new data that we might have obtained after we have generated that path in our mind. In addition to that, after going down one path for a long time it is hard to admit that all that time was a waste (although it really wasn’t because we eliminated that as a viable path). Ego can also be a problem if we went down that path publicly because it is embarrassing to admit to others that we were wrong. If your income or position in society were in some way based on having gone down that path, there would be other reasons that it would be hard to change to another better path. It, therefore, takes a great amount of will power and willingness to suffer if you have to in order to consciously keep in control of yourself to keep your mind open to new information and be willing to change your path when you see it is nonproductive and a better option is present. When you get more experienced, you can often proceed down more that one alternative path in your mind to the point that you can at least eliminate some paths as not practical or as dead ends and thus make it more likely that you will chose the best of the remaining paths. In the end though God promises to guide his people in the path that they should go in and that is the best choice because he made all of the paths that we can go in and knows the best one for us to travel in at any time.
I like your example using the convective cycle as a likeness to the way that a group of people reacts when God chooses it and gives it the energy, direction, and opportunity to rise up to a higher and more powerful position in the world and how it is that when it gets to the top it tends to leave the source of its energy, direction, and opportunity (God) and then falls back down to the bottom. A good example of the ones that stay with God would be someone that would rise up in a hot air balloon with an unlimited power source (God) so he could stay up at the top. I do see some problems with your description of Israel, however. First the essence of Israel began with Abraham who was the father of most of the people in that area of the Middle East. God had promised that land and even more to Abraham and through him to Isaac and through him to Jacob who later was called Israel by God. God carried through on that promise in the time of King David of Israel. At that time, Israel possessed a larger area than it now does. So instead of taking over someone else’s land it is more that they were given back some of the land that God had previously given them and they had previously possessed. This was not taken by them by force either, but was given to them through the United Nations after World War II. It would not be reasonable to consider this as colonization either both because it was a return of land that they had previously possessed as their homeland and also because a nation can not truly colonize unless it first has a homeland that can rule over its colonies. The land that they got was and is their only homeland. It is interesting that the United States was founded by those who had come over from Europe and had displaced the native inhabitants (the American Indian nations) and people do not generally think of the United States as a colonial empire over the American Indian nations that should give all that land back and leave. Most nations on earth have similar histories in which various other nations were in control at one time or another of much or all of their land. Some later got the land returned to them and some did not. Another way to look at the interactions between the European nations and the Islamic nations is that when Christianity first spread in Europe those nations were often blessed when they embraced Christianity. Later many of those who were rulers in the church in Rome and later elsewhere began to leave God and do many evil things in God’s name even saying that the pope was God on earth. These things culminated in the Dark Ages in Europe. During this time God raised up the Islamic nations against Europe and used them as a witness to the European nations of his disproval of what they were doing by taking away their peace. Later God Gave the printing press to the Europeans and a large number of copies of the scriptures were made, so that for the first time many of the average people in Europe had access to God’s word. These people saw that much of what their religious leaders were doing was not according to God’s word and sometimes peaceably and sometimes through conflict the church began to return back to God. God then blessed those nations again by giving them knowledge of new technologies while at the same time withholding that knowledge from the Islamic nations. This caused the European nations to be able to overcome and reverse the advancement of the Islamic nations and returned peace to Europe. Of course God is not done with using the Islamic nations. In the future there will be a war that will be started by four Islamic nations that will kill one third of the people that are on earth at that time, as an example. God’s place at the top of the cycle is not a problem unless you believe that he really does not exist. If he exists as the creator of the universe, he would as the designer of the world know all things for all times in this world and would, therefore not get obsolete by not keeping up with the latest knowledge or through the deterioration that we are subject to as we age. Of course, the reason that we have a desire to look up to a leader rather than favoring solitary individualism or only local family ties could be that God designed us with the purpose that we would desire to look up to him. I do see your point about man not being able to fulfill the position of being God, but God can fulfill it very well. As far as reductionism is concerned the concept that the world came about by pure chance (probability) is one of the most reductionist concepts possible. It tries to explain the great complexity of the world as the result of simple chance events. There is generally no real attempt to determine all of such simple events and the order that they would have to happen in to generate today’s world. Instead vague generalities are used to describe the world. On the other hand, in order to create the world, God has to be very complex and has to have gone through many complex steps to create the world. Unlike chance, which by definition has no purpose in mind or even a mind to have a purpose in, God being an intelligent being would likely have such a purpose for making the creation. So, from the reductionist standpoint God’s existence is a much less reductionist concept than the alternative. God plainly says in the scriptures that he is not a man and that his ways are above our ways. So anyone who reads the scriptures should not consider him to be an old man. Man has likely sometimes drawn that conclusion because God said that he made man in his image, but the image is never as good as the real thing. Since God said that the woman is made in the glory or image of the man, what is really being seen through the image is that if a man marries a woman and the man perfectly does all things according to God’s will concerning the woman and the woman perfectly does all things according to God’s will concerning the man, those that observe them would see an image of the relationship that God intends to have with us. Of course, the real thing will be much better than the image. That along with the fact that God is very old is likely to be why man, especially those who do not really know him might view God as an old man, but that is not close to true, however. As a matter of fact in the New Testament, part of the first step that a man takes in going away from God is to think of him as a man or some other creature. In truth God is so much greater than any of us that to think of him as a man, a woman, or any other part of the creation is an insult to him because he is much more than the creation as a whole let alone any part of it. He, therefore, is the only one that can allow man to rise above his local monopole prejudices because there is no issue of balance between him and us in any way. He has given to us all that we are and all that we have, and there is nothing that we can do to give anything back to him that he cannot make or do better himself. You are right that Jesus did not come to offer another God to worship, but only a New Testament (agreement) with the same only true God of the Old Testament. Although God is the Father directly of Jesus Christ and by him of all of us, he represents not only all the previous generations, but also the present and all future generations, as he is the source of all of us. Although God has given us the freedom to choose to deny his existence to ourselves if we choose to do so, he has not given us the ability to change his existence in any way, so to deny him would just mean believing a lie. God is so much greater than we are that we could not hope to rise even up to be equal with him let alone higher than him. Although God is so much higher than we are, he humbled himself and came to us in his son, not as himself in all his glory, not as an angel, a principality, or even a power, but as a man. He came not as a rich or powerful man (king or ruler), but as the son of a carpenter (a working class man (a servant)). He gave us his New Testament (agreement) and did works that no man could do to confirm that his words were really from him (that it was really him and not just a man pretending to be him). He lived the perfect life without sin so that later when he suffered torture and death on the cross he would be an acceptable sacrifice to pay the ransom for our sins so that we could be redeemed to God and saved from our sins by our faith in him. God the Father was in him all the time except when it came time for him to die as the Father can’t die and if he had remained in his son the son would not be able to die either. He pretty much covered both the top and the bottom so there is really no excuse to not believe in him. He was there at the beginning when he created the world and he will be there at the end of the world also. He got rid of the status quo in that he made it so you don’t have to go through any man except his son to be saved and the only requirements are that you believe in him and receive him as your Lord and savior, so no establishment in this world can keep you out or require anything of you for you to be saved. Although the scriptures show that it was not easy for Jesus to give up his life, it also records the he did it willingly for his Father and for us. If the Father had killed him to avoid a revolution he would not have raised him up from the dead three days later. Before his death he said that the Father had given him the power to lay his life down and the power to take it back up again and the Father kept his word. It was really the greatest show of love and compassion for us that God could have given in that the Father loved us enough even though we had sinned against him and were, therefore, worthy of death, to ask his son to die for us so that we could have our sins forgiven and be restored back to him and be saved. The Son also loved the Father and us enough to go through death for us when he was the only one that was truly worthy to not die, as he had not sinned.
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Narendra Nath wrote on Dec. 26, 2008 @ 13:14 GMT
i enjoyed getting sandwiched between Paul & John on the postings on this essay. Hope we all are wiser, including others who have read the postings. The purpose of this wonderful essay contest gets served well to the credit of the FQX Institute.
John Merryman wrote on Dec. 27, 2008 @ 01:29 GMT
Paul,
Sorry to have missed your last post. I was going by the number count and mine had been 34. I've noticed another thread(Sean Carroll) drop a number as well.
I have to agree with your description of space, as it is the vacuum in which fluctuation exists. As the basis of being it is absolute and the unbounded infinite as well.
I really haven't a desire to argue your religious convictions. They are the thread of narrative by which you explain reality. While I have some other thoughts on the subject and they are not as tightly bound into a particular narrative, that is only because it is not my inclination to have all of creation bound into a single narrative. While the singular defines, it also constricts. I find God's grace to be fleeting and it is most fleeting when we hold it too tightly. It grows when we let it go to choose its path, as we choose our own. Some of us are wheat and some of us are chaff, but we all end up as fertilizer to what comes next. The spirit goes into the future, as the memories fall away into the past, but without those memories, there would be no future. Without death, there can be no life. The ancients understood that. That's why they worshiped sacrifice. We, on the other hand, fear death and hide in our possessions and memories.
Paul N. Butler wrote on Jan. 1, 2009 @ 03:40 GMT
Narendra,
Thank you, and thanks also to those who put on this contest and those who sponsored it for the opportunity given to many that would not otherwise have had a good place to voice their theories and concepts. It is a big step toward getting the scientific community to the place that it should have been all along, as an open forum that receives and analyzes all concepts equally regardless of the source of the information on the basis of scientific merit alone. A good second step would be to create a national scientific archive that would hold all the information on all scientific theories and concepts that have not been proven to be scientifically invalid and the detailed reasons as to why those concepts that have been deleted are considered to be scientifically invalid. It should be cataloged so that similar fields of study are linked together so that concepts can be linked to all fields that they pertain to for easy reference. The archive should be free and open to all except for those areas that require limited access due to national security.
Paul N. Butler wrote on Jan. 1, 2009 @ 04:04 GMT
John,
That is ok. I haven’t even had the chance to read all of the papers let alone keep track of all of the comments attached to them. It would be good if all of this contest information was put into a book or an internet archive, so that we and others could later go over it at our leisure then contact any one who had given information that was of interest to us to inquire deeper into...
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John,
That is ok. I haven’t even had the chance to read all of the papers let alone keep track of all of the comments attached to them. It would be good if all of this contest information was put into a book or an internet archive, so that we and others could later go over it at our leisure then contact any one who had given information that was of interest to us to inquire deeper into it. This would mean that we would have to be willing to give our e-mail address out, but that could be made optional.
The concept that fluctuations of space generate energy and matter entities comes from quantum theory and when you get to the level below quantum effects that generates those effects you find that the world has more of an analog construction than a quantum construction. It appears that the total of all the motions of all motion entities (energy and matter particles, etc.) has not changed from the beginning of the world until now. The only thing that has changed is how that overall motion total has been dispersed into the individual motion entities that exist at a given time (point in the motion progression). Although motion entities can transfer from other fifth vector structural levels to our level or visa versa and appear as though they just came into being, they already existed previously in the level that they were transferred from and so they are not actually newly created entities or motions, but are just another example of motion transfers. It is true, however, that the dimensional system that the motions exist in did preexist the motion that was later added to the system.
At this point whether you chose religion or science as your guide to the world, you are left with the concept that the world had a beginning or creation and has progressed from that beginning to its present condition through a single path or narrative. The problem is not that such a narrative does not exist; it is just that man has not been able to fully grasp it in its entirety. It is true that such a narrative both defines reality and at the same time restricts or constricts it to the definition thus obtained, but that is really what the pursuit of knowledge is all about. We are continually striving to conform our narrative of the way we see and understand the world and how it works to the ultimate true narrative of how it actually is and how it actually works by continually testing our narrative in light of our observations of the world around us and changing it as necessary so that in the end it will hopefully attain as closely as possible to the world’s true narrative. God’s grace will go in the path that he has prepared for it according to how he has defined it, so that it will be given to those who meet the requirements that he has established for those who will receive it regardless of what we do. He has also given us to be able to choose either the path that will allow us to receive his grace or to reject that path and take another that will cause us to not receive his grace. Because the path that is chosen by us makes the difference between life and death and because I have compassion on others and desire life for as many as possible, I try to take and encourage as many others as I can to take the path that God has set out for us that leads to life. It is true that after we leave this world our bodies will return to the dust of the earth from which they were formed, but that is not the important part, as God’s intent is that we live in a new and better body (his body). It is also true that there is the wheat that will be saved and the chaff that will be burned up at the end, but my job here is to help gather the wheat to God. The chaff will decide to take a different path. For those who chose the path that will lead to their being saved, both the spirit and that part of the soul that is not of the flesh will be saved. It is likely that they will, therefore, have access to all their stored records of their past as well as their future intents and will continue to live in the present. They will just interface through a new body. It is evident that life can exist without death because the first living being (whether you believe in God as that being or some one celled creature as that being) lived in the world before any death existed. The opposite is true, however, that without life there can be no death. My study of sacrifice indicates that it was usually introduced by those that feared death (and understood that they deserved death because of their actions) as an attempt to persuade God to accept the death of another in their place. The replacement usually had to be as pure as possible to be a worthy sacrifice in order to redeem the other from the penalty of death by the payment of the willing death of the pure sacrifice. Of course, when the sacrifice was an animal, it was not usually given the opportunity to make that choice for itself. This is a precursor or prediction that God built into us of his chosen method to allow us to be restored to him and be saved after we disobeyed him (sinned against him) and were worthy of death (as the penalty for that sin), by his son’s willful offering up of his pure life for payment to redeem us from our sins for the restoration of us back to God. It is true that most people still fear death today and try to avoid any thought of it if possible. Having been on both the unbeliever and the believer sides of the existence of God argument at different times in my life, I found that I much more desired to avoid thinking about death on the unbeliever side because on that side death meant the end of existence and even when things in life were bad, it was more preferable to continue to live because as long as I was alive things could change and get better (and they did), but one could not hope for an escape from death to something better later. On the believer side, the fear of nonexistence is done away with. It is just the unknown process of getting to the better place through death that remains. We always tend to fear the unknown. I suspect that after the fact at least for the ones that are saved, we will wonder why we thought of death as such a big fearful thing. It will probably be much like birth into this world. You leave this small existence that you have grown comfortable with and accustom to and enter into a new greater existence with much greater potential for fulfillment.
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John Merryman wrote on Jan. 2, 2009 @ 03:02 GMT
Paul,
I generally concur with your view of physics, but I do feel your religious construct tends more toward indoctrination than insight. We are all narrative threads drawn from the web of connections in which we exist, as are our religious, political and economic institutions. There has to be some balance between the coherence which makes these narrative structures whole and the connectivity which makes them a viable part of the larger environment, so they are neither so isolated as to be irrelevant, or overbearing as to be destructive and or parasitic.
While the basis of Christianity is Judaic, it was the Greeks who really formalized it. This seems to be because it served to connect their primordial religious customs with their emerging rationality. It provided the metaphor for the cycle of life through the unknown of death. The Greeks had long and complex formulations to deal with this relationship, which Christianity served to crystalize in a way that allowed them to shed some excess cultural baggage. Yet many of those traditions of variety and synthesis emerged in the Christian monotheism, from the Holy Trinity to the incorporation of polytheistic deities as saints, angels, cherubs, the Holy Mother, etc, though the deeper connections have been lost. Like a rope woven together from many different threads and then having the many loose ends trimmed off.
I can understand your desire to define this rope as a whole and with a clear purpose, yet for me, those many threads, where they came from, how they fit together, creating both the strengths and weakness of this rope, are of far greater interest than simply presenting a neat package, all wrapped up and signed, sealed and ready for delivery. This is because it is those loose ends which connect me to my larger reality and trimming them is the real sacrilege.
Paul N. Butler wrote on Jan. 5, 2009 @ 07:24 GMT
John,
It is good that we have some agreement in physics concepts. As far as religious constructs are concerned, you are right in the sense that they tend toward indoctrination (i.e. instructing, teaching), but I believe that is partly what we are both here for. Another part at least for me is to study and learn of others in this world. Insight is a difficult thing to comprehend in many...
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John,
It is good that we have some agreement in physics concepts. As far as religious constructs are concerned, you are right in the sense that they tend toward indoctrination (i.e. instructing, teaching), but I believe that is partly what we are both here for. Another part at least for me is to study and learn of others in this world. Insight is a difficult thing to comprehend in many cases. Some have been thought to possess great insight at a given time by others around them only to be proven wrong at a later time by better understandings of reality. Others were thought to be fools in their time only to be proven to have had insight so great that it was just too much for others of their time to accept their understandings. Ultimately reality steps in and reveals the true insights. I am content to let reality have its way in the long run because my desire is to know and understand the truth more than to always be proven right. To me the narrative structures are not really whole until they connect to the larger environment at all relevant points, so the whole picture is understood. When it comes to the balance point of the emphasis that is appropriate to give a part of the overall narrative of the universe, the best balance is obtained when the part of the overall narrative that is being examined is given the same importance that it possesses in comparison to the true whole narrative. As an example, if someone spent their life in the study of the relative importance of the contributions of Gelatin as compared to pudding in the overall progression of the universe and believed that everyone should consider his study to be the most important endeavor ever to be undertaken and should put all resources into finding the complete answer to that question, that would be destructive and or parasitic because there are many other more important things to study. The existence or nonexistence of God, however, is the most important part of the whole narrative because it goes to the beginning foundations of that narrative and its overall meaning. If God exists, the whole universe is his work and questions such as: (What is the purpose of the universe? and what is our purpose?) make sense to ask. In that case all aspects of the way the universe is made can give us insight into the nature of God who made it. If God does not exist and the world just came about by chance, there would be no true purpose or underlying meaning to the universe or the living beings in it. It is so important to the overall narrative because it is the difference between an intelligent narrative written by an intelligent author and just the chance output of an innumerable number of monkeys pounding on an innumerable number of keyboards for a very long time. The way that a person answers the question of the existence of God will greatly determine how he looks at the universe as a whole and how he looks at the place and importance that he and all other living creatures have in it. Although he may not always consciously think about it, his thoughts and actions in the world will greatly be affected and determined by this most basic belief. I have done some study in this area and it would take much more space than would be reasonable to give all the results here, but it was to a great degree the incomplete and misleading one sided information given by many on both sides of this controversy that caused me to take so long and invest so much of my time in study to search out which belief is more credible than the other because I found that I could not depend on sources on either side to give me intelligent and truthful answers to my questions in this area.
Your second paragraph is a good example. You explain Christianity as though it is just some social movement started by the Jews and formalized by the Greeks. As though the people created Christ and God and are in control of how the movement progresses and what meanings apply to it. This is, of course, what those who do not believe in God often believe and transmit to others. I am not saying that studying how Christianity has affected different groups of people is of no value. It can show how God can work with and in all people to accomplish his purpose. I am just saying that the viewpoint that you presented is one sided. The other side is that God created Christianity in the same way that he created all other things and is in complete control of it to use it to accomplish his purpose and has defined its meaning and how it works. You can look at different groups of people and see how it has affected both those who believe and those who do not believe in each group, but when you look close you find that in all of the groups there are some who give up the customs that are contrary and change so that they believe according to the scriptures (God’s Word) and those are the ones that fulfill God’s purpose for it all. He only needs a few at a time (in comparison to all the people that are alive at a given time) over a long period of time to get what he desires in the end. The others are just the noise and not the signal as you might put it. As you can see from the two sides that were given, one views Christianity from man’s perspective, giving man the control over it and either denying God’s existence at all or making him less powerful to control the outcome than man, while the other side places God in complete control and eliminates any changes in the world by man. In reality, there is a delicate interplay between God and man because God has given man the ability to accept his offer to be a part of his purpose for making man or to reject it, so that what you see is a combination of the changes that are made in both those who believe and receive Christ as God’s son and the way for their salvation and those who reject his offer. When you look at those who receive Christ, you don’t see a monotone of immediate change from former beliefs and action, but a gradual change over a period of time called sanctification, so you will see a range of behavior from those who are still much like the unbelievers to those who are completely changed. To complicate matters, the unbelievers see that many of the changes they see in the believers are desirable, so they adopt many of them and even put them into their laws, so you see a range of changes in the unbelievers also. I could go on and correct every error in your comment, but I will only do a couple. First, the information that God is composed of more than one part is clearly seen in the old testament of the Jews and is not something that was added by the Greeks later. In Genesis God said to himself, Let us make man in our image. Man is composed of a body, a soul, and a spirit, so this signifies that God is also composed of three parts, since man is made in his image. Second, the saints, angels, cherubs, and the Holy Mother (Mary) are never considered deities by God in the scriptures. As an example, the angels are called ministering spirits that minister to (or serve) God.
I don’t believe in cutting any of the threads at all. My point is that you get the whole rope when you look at the complete history of how the people in the different groups respond to each other in respect to Christianity both within a single group and between groups and both with believers and unbelievers and also look at God’s work in generating and controlling Christianity while also giving man the choice to participate in his work or not and then also looking at the interplay between God and man in how Christianity plays out in the world (due to God’s working and each individual’s choice) to give us the total range of what we see it to be and all of its effects. If you concentrate on only the limited viewpoint of how unbelievers view Christianity you are just cutting off and looking at a small piece of the rope.
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John Merryman wrote on Jan. 6, 2009 @ 01:06 GMT
Paul,
I respect how you define your life, but I can't fit myself into that mold. As I've probably pointed out before, the absolute is basis, not apex, so the spiritual absolute is the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell.
In line with my observations about time, the only reality is the present and that is what this spirit manifests. Frankly my God is just as happy with monkeys typing at typewriters, as with God in human form being nailed to a cross, though monkeys wouldn't waste their time on something without purpose. That is what matters; purpose. Without purpose there is no existence. Be it stone, or cement, wheat or chaff, everything has its place in the puzzle. It is when we look for meaning that problems arise, because meaning is reductionistic. It's what's left when you distill away all that's meaningless. Yet there is no wheat without chaff. What might be just noise from your perspective, is signal from some other perspective and there are myriad feedback loops which can make that other perspective essential to your own. You hold your version of monotheistic religion up as the one true path, yet there are people throughout this world with equally strong views and different religions. It is what gives their life meaning. It is what's left when all that is meaningless is distilled away. Currently the other two monotheistic religions are killing each other over a small piece of land because it has different meaning to each and the other's meaning is just noise. How much of this search for meaning isn't just a function of our instinctive searching for food and shelter? To a hunter gatherer, it is the berries on the bush which have meaning, not the bush itself. How much of our belief structures are really just an advanced form of that? We want what we want and just do not have the capacity to see the larger context? We are always trying to distill out the most fundamental laws, the hardest materials, the strongest energies, the most powerful Gods. I'm certainly guilty of it myself, or I wouldn't be in this contest. Yet I find that when I reach a goal, its real value is giving me perspective on all that has gone into reaching that goal, not simply aiming for the next goal. Oftentimes what becomes the next goal lays in something I previously discarded. It is my identity to see all the pieces fit together, not to throw most of them away.
Paul N. Butler wrote on Jan. 6, 2009 @ 04:48 GMT
John,
I have looked into the concept of rising from a low basis and have found it lacking if God does not exist. Without God the only other alternative is that the world and all things in it including us came about by some chance event with no purpose. What we see as our rise can only be logically viewed as a series of chance events in such a world. It would be the result of a long lucky...
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John,
I have looked into the concept of rising from a low basis and have found it lacking if God does not exist. Without God the only other alternative is that the world and all things in it including us came about by some chance event with no purpose. What we see as our rise can only be logically viewed as a series of chance events in such a world. It would be the result of a long lucky streak that could end at any time and would surely do so given enough time according to the laws of probability. You could point to the idea that once natural selection came about by chance it became the source of a rise from the basis, but that would not be true. Natural selection only allows an organism to adapt to its environment. It does not necessarily cause an organism to rise to some higher level of intelligence or to gain a new ability or gain an increase in any other specific abilities. The dinosaurs thrived by gaining size and strength to overcome and displace there enemies, but when a change in environment occurred so that the world could not produce the large amount of food that they needed to support their large size and strength they were displaced by the smaller creatures that they once had displaced. Intelligence and the physical ability to use it also require a relatively large creature to support it (although not as large as the dinosaurs). If the climate were to change so that nothing larger than a cockroach could survive, we would also pass away and small size would be chosen by natural selection rather than intelligence. Our existence and the selection of intelligence could only be realistically looked at as an anomaly that is likely to be of a short term nature due to all of the possible chance events that could occur to destroy it. To natural selection we and our intelligence are inherently no more important or advanced than the cockroach and its size. What is favored and therefore promoted is just dependent on chance mechanical changes in the environment. You are left then with a world of no real importance or purpose as a living creature of no real importance or purpose for your life that could end at any time, except the primal desire to survive and be as comfortable as possible. The only reasonable outlook in such a world is to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die, as is written in the scriptures of those who do not know God. Of course you could rationalize some made up purpose or that there is some natural mechanism that favors your existence, but you would only be living a lie. True chance favors no one and cannot care about anyone.
To worship any such world or any part of it as a god let alone as the God would indeed be foolish. In such a world your God could not be happy about anything because happiness is a property of living beings and the world would not be living in any real sense. I agree with you that purpose matters, but your world would not have any true purpose so life in it would be an empty experience for anyone intelligent enough to understand that. There would be no real puzzle to solve. Everything would just be a jumble of chance happenings or events with no overall real purpose or answer to solve for. In such a world after you distilled away all that was meaningless there would be nothing left at all. Any attempt to draw some true meaning from the meaningless jumble of events would be futile and any supposed meanings that one might draw out of that jumble would just be wishful thinking and a lie. In a world based on chance any conclusion that one might draw about anything would be based on a lie. The lie would be that anything no matter how permanent that it may have been up until now will continue to be permanent. Statements such as there can be no wheat without chaff or that what might be just noise to one perspective is signal from some other perspective, would be meaningless because in a chance world you could just as likely wake up tomorrow to find that by chance wheat now grows without chaff or that the plant only produces chaff and no wheat. In truth everything would just be noise and there would be no true valid signal that could tell you anything lasting about the world. If the world came about by chance, it could just as easily blink out of existence also at any time with no warning by chance. In the chance world there would be no larger context. What is in existence is there by chance and could just as easily cease to exist at any time by chance. Any laws of behavior in the world would just be chance occurrences that could just as easily change at any time, so why bother to spend all the time necessary to find them out when they could change tomorrow. You should just forget science and eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die and it would just have been a waste of your time and pleasure to try to understand an unsure changing world. All that has gone into reaching your goal would just be meaningless chance occurrences with no true valid perspective and there would be no real value there to get. In such a world there would be no deeper meaning behind the way all the pieces fit together. It would all come down to chance. Of course, the world was either created by God or it was not created by God, which means that according to probability there is a fifty/fifty chance that either possibility is true. So if you throw away either possibility you are throwing away one half of the pieces.
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John Merryman wrote on Jan. 6, 2009 @ 22:55 GMT
Paul,
I just don't equate the essence of conscious awareness with the structure of knowledge. One is a mystery. The other is a feedback loop. I'm a farmer. I don't need some institution to make me whole. I remember thinking church didn't make much sense when I was quite young and it didn't take me long to recognize it as another form of mind control. I spend my life controlling animals. I know how it works. Carrot=hope. Stick=fear. Good=beneficial. Bad=detrimental. Attracted to one. Repelled by the other. Governments, religions, businesses have all been perfecting their methods for millenia, but the underlaying processes are far older than humanity. I know I'm just a little fish out in the big ocean, but I like it that way. I don't need a straitjacket to make sense of it all. The past contracts. The future expands. That's why we go toward the future.
As for dinosaurs, did it ever occur to you that they must have existed in a weaker gravity field? Whether the earth was smaller and the accumulated space debris over ten of millions of years increased it, or it rotated faster, or some combination, it just seems they were built far too delicately for their size and apparent speed. Not to mention that avian experts can't understand how the bigger flying ones could get airborne. Of course a weaker gravity field would also mean a less dense atmosphere, so maybe it just rotated faster.....
Paul N. Butler wrote on Jan. 12, 2009 @ 03:12 GMT
John,
You are right that conscious awareness is not the same thing as the structure of knowledge. The two are connected to each other, however. The structure of our knowledge is based on the patterns that we perceive in the world around us. It is based on analysis of both the present motion conditions that we are observing and on the stored records of previous present motion conditions. ...
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John,
You are right that conscious awareness is not the same thing as the structure of knowledge. The two are connected to each other, however. The structure of our knowledge is based on the patterns that we perceive in the world around us. It is based on analysis of both the present motion conditions that we are observing and on the stored records of previous present motion conditions. It is also somewhat based on the predicted present motion conditions that have not yet occurred, but are indicated as likely to occur by the results of the analysis of the present active and past stored motion conditions. Much of our knowledge is based on repetitive cycles that we observe. As an example, we see the sun come up in the morning and later we see it go down again. We see this cycle repeat many times and after awhile, when we see the sun go down we predict that it will come up again later. These observations and the predictions, and connections that we make between them become parts of our knowledge base. Our conscious awareness is greatly based on our observation of and ability to react to and control observed motion conditions. We first separate motions that are beyond our control from those that we can control or generate at least to some degree. We then learn that our body can be controlled directly by our mind, but that we can only control other things indirectly by motions of our body parts. From these observations we become consciously aware that we exist and have at least two parts, a mind that observes motion inputs from our body parts about the body itself and also about the world that exists outside of our body and the body that passes information to our mind and also carries out generating motions that our mind commands it to produce to allow us to interact with the other entities that exist in the world around us. At this point it should be clear that our conscious awareness is informed of many things by our knowledge structure and information about our conscious awareness is stored in our knowledge structure, so the two are joined together in many ways. I also have a dislike for institutions that have been created by men in an attempt to gain power and control over others and to get gain from others in order to fulfil their selfish desires at the expense of others. As I covered somewhat earlier, however, God’s institution is different from those of men. First, when we come to him we only have to go through one mediator (his son Jesus Christ) (although many organizations have been created by men that try to lead you to believe otherwise) unlike most organizations of men that have multiple levels of separation between you and the one at the top. On the surface it might seem that it would be better if we did not have to go through any mediator at all, but could interact directly with God the Father. In reality the whole world that we live in requires us to go through mediators in order gain any information about it or to interact with it in any way. As an example, when you look at your car, you are not really interacting directly with the car. You are only interacting with the mediator of light that transfers information to you about the car as the mediator between you and the car. On the one hand you will never really get to obtain information directly from the car itself, but on the other hand you can get information from the mediator (light) about the car even when the car is far enough away that you would not be able to interact with it directly even if that were possible. Whether you choose to go to God or to the world around you for information, you are stuck with going through mediators to get that information and I see it as a good thing that God has placed only the minimum one layer between him and us. The second difference is that men create organizations primarily to take resources (money, power and control) away from those that become parts of the organizations and sometimes also from those that are outside of the organizations to increase their own resources. God on the other hand, used his own resources (a part of his motion) to create us and this whole world for us to live in. In essence he has given us life and all of the resources that we have. On top of that, he offers to us the choice to become members of his eternal body that he is building for himself. Instead of his organization taking resources from us it has given everything to us that we have and offers more to come. All we have to do is to choose to join it. It is true that God does desire to control your mind, so that you will become a member of his body that is beneficial to him and the other members of the body, so that we will all grow together in love and caring for one another eternally. I am sure that you desire the same from the members of your body. If some part of your body decided to do its own thing and not care about the needs of the whole body (cancer) you would not very likely say will I guess it has the right to live its life the way that it wants to even if it results in the death of the whole body. God also does use all of the control methods that you mentioned and you are right that they are older than humanity because he is the inventor of them all. The main difference here is that he uses them for our benefit to lead us to him and to encourage us to accept his offer of salvation rather than the ultimate death and destruction that waits for those that do not accept his offer. Of course, there is no real past or future, but only the present. The past seems to contract because as the records of previous motion conditions get older and older they become less important to us and except for those that store a few important events they tend to fade from use by our conscious mind. This gives the appearance of a past that contracts as its records seem to blend more together and eventually disappear from our direct observation. The future seems to be expanding because as we learn more from analyzing past and present motion conditions, we can make more and better predictions about what those conditions will be in the future. The same motions are occurring in the present and they will propagate into the same later motion conditions in the same way (there is no real expansion). We have just learned about more of the motion conditions that will occur and we interpret that as an expansion. If you look at the top of a bucket of marbles you might count one hundred marbles. If you later learn how to see through the top layer of marbles you might then see one hundred more marbles in the second layer. You might say that there has been an expansion of marbles from one hundred to two hundred, but in reality they were all there in the beginning. It is just that you did not know about the second layer in the beginning.
When it comes to dinosaurs, there has always been much conjecture and speculation about such things as their speed, intelligence, and other characteristics that is usually based on little or no evidence. In most cases there is at most a reasonably well-preserved skeleton and more often much less than that. In some cases whole stories about the appearance and habits of some creature have been created from a find of only a few bones. Over time the story about a given creature changes to suit the changing beliefs and desires of those that tell it. As far as the earth rotating faster in the past is concerned I do not see a great amount of support for that in the scientific community, but the scriptures give information that could be interpreted as leading one in that direction. First they record that man lived up to about a thousand years in the beginning. If our bodies are made to last a given period of time, we would live for more years if the earth rotated faster as more days and years would pass in that time. The lifetime decreased to about one hundred and twenty years abruptly in the time of Peleg. It is also recorded that the earth was divided in his time. The slowing of the rotation of the earth in a very short time certainly could have had the effect of separating the continents or dividing the earth. This is just another case where the scriptures contain information about the world that is mostly ignored. On a lighter side it could be that the reason that those bigger flying ones are extinct is that they all jumped off of cliffs thinking that they could fly only to find out that they couldn’t and as hard as they tried, they just could not evolve enough before they hit the ground. Sorry, I just could not resist that one.
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John Merryman wrote on Jan. 18, 2009 @ 02:35 GMT
Paul,
I don't think that awareness and the feedback loop of knowledge can be separated. Any more than we could understand the vacuum without the fluctuation. Without the subjective totality, the absolute really is just nothing.
I can appreciate your faith in your religion, but you have to understand that I value my beliefs as well. I view ideals as necessary for learning, but they do have their limitations. The obvious example is when opposing ideals are in conflict, there is no room for compromise, as with the current situation in the Middle East.
Religious absolutists tend to deride anything less as moral relativism, where nothing has real value, but that's a complete misunderstanding of relativity. Absolutists assume there is an absolute standard against which all is judged, while relativism means that every possible aspect must be weighed. The first is subject to whomever makes the judgments in the name of the absolute authority and history shows this is often abused. The latter can be extremely complex, but tends toward more balanced judgments. As an example, it should be noted that democracy was originally developed by polytheists, while the validation for monarchy has historically been monotheism, as in the divine right of kings.
For me, it is a world that has formed from the elemental to the complex and returns to the elemental when the complex becomes unbalanced, not one handed down by higher authority.
Paul N. Butler wrote on Jan. 27, 2009 @ 20:27 GMT
John,
Yes awareness and knowledge are joined together in many ways as I mentioned in my last post. Awareness is actually a form or part of knowledge. To gain awareness of the existence of one’s self and other things in the world is synonymous with gaining a degree of knowledge of these things.
You definitely have the right to believe what you will. That is what free will is all...
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John,
Yes awareness and knowledge are joined together in many ways as I mentioned in my last post. Awareness is actually a form or part of knowledge. To gain awareness of the existence of one’s self and other things in the world is synonymous with gaining a degree of knowledge of these things.
You definitely have the right to believe what you will. That is what free will is all about. Opposing ideals are a problem if one assumes that all ideals are of equal value. In general, if two ideals are in conflict or mutually exclusive, one or both of them is either being misapplied or is not a true or complete ideal. Although there are some faulty ideals there also, many of the problems in the Middle East come from misapplications of ideals.
Absolutists whether religious or otherwise often don’t see that there are exceptions to most laws, rules, or ideals. At first it seemed odd to me when I noticed that in one place in the scriptures God would tell the people to do or not do a certain thing and then in another place he would command people to do the opposite. It took me awhile to see that the problem was not with God, but with man’s placing the law (that God gave to them to keep) higher than God as though God should be subject to the laws that he commands men to keep or should not have the right to change them according to his will. To a degree, the exceptions to the laws are God’s way of showing people that the law is not the absolute, but that God is the true absolute and is above and rules over the laws. In addition, the exceptions that God has put into his laws are for the most part due to various circumstances (aspects) that must be considered (weighed) to arrive at the full absolute understanding of how the law is to be applied, so it is a combination of absolute laws or ideals that are complex in nature so that every aspect or circumstance must be weighed in order to come to the understanding of the absolute application of the law for all possibilities of circumstances. The problem is that man likes to have everything very simple, so a man will likely read the first place that the law or ideal is mentioned and apply the partial meaning that is given in that one place to all circumstances thus causing many problems due to its misapplication in other different circumstances. In order to make things simple man will usually only look at and then gravitate toward one side of an issue without searching out the whole issue. This can be seen in the psychological test in which a cup with water in it to the center of the range between empty and full is presented to someone and he is then asked to state the amount of water in the cup. The person will usually respond that it is either half empty or half full (the complete answer is that it is both half empty and half full) and the choice that was made will then be interpreted as either a negative or positive outlook on life. The person could have said that it contains water to the mid point of its range, but that would be a more difficult concept, so the average person will give a half answer rather than the complete answer because of his desire to have everything be simple. People tend to apply these half answers in their lives even to the circumstances where the other half of the answer would be more applicable and thereby generate many unnecessary problems. The form of democracy that has so far worked the best in the real world (the government of the United States of America) was produced by those who were predominantly Christian monotheists.
At one time I would have agreed with you about the way the world was formed, but over time as I have delved further into the arguments and observations I have found them lacking in their ability to explain how it could have happened that way in any truly reasonable way. First, the concept that the world came about by some chance event does not truly exclude God from the equation, as many believe, because when we speak of a chance event we are saying that we do not know the cause of the event or its results. If we truly knew the cause we could predict the outcome before the event and it would not be a chance event. You might assume that if you throw a balanced coin into the air and let it come to rest on the ground, it will land with the head side up half of the time and with the tail side up half of the time, but in reality the results will not be distributed that way most of the time. First any odd toss cannot yield an exact fifty to fifty percent ratio because you have an extra toss that cannot be divided between the two possibilities. Even if you restrict your observations to only the even tosses, you will find that you will not likely have an exact fifty to fifty percent ratio of heads to tails vary often compared to the number of results that are not exactly fifty to fifty percent. There is obviously something that is causing the results to vary in a way that we call random, but that cause is not known. In this and all other similar cases of supposed random behavior that we observe in the real world because we do not know the cause of the results of these events we cannot logically rule out that God may be causing them. When we see such things we may be just seeing one of God’s interface levels with the universe. He may be varying the result of such things in such a way as to generate the results that he desires in the world. If those who believe that quantum mechanics describes the ultimate limit of the amount of knowledge that we can obtain about the world around us because of the uncertainty principle are right, the quantum level could just be God’s ultimate interface level with the universe beyond which he will not let us go to observe his workings in the world (I am not saying that I believe that quantum mechanics truly is such a limit). The point is that saying that the world came about by some chance event could be synonymous with saying that God created it if he is the source of random events and we do not understand random events to the point that we can come close to saying truthfully that he does not cause them. The belief that he does not cause them is as much a leap of faith as the belief that he does cause them. At the current level of technological knowledge, it ultimately just comes down to what a person desires to believe. Science works well only when considering repetitive events that can be tested and observed. One-time events that cannot be repeated or those that cannot be observed in some way (and therefore cannot be tested) the cause of which cannot be determined are outside of the proper application range of science. From my point of view and that of all who truly are of God, the point of telling others about God is not to win an argument over them or to gain money from or power over them, but to do what can be done to aid as many as possible to be saved from the destruction that unbelievers ultimately suffer due to their choice to disbelieve God out because of our caring and compassion for them. That choice, however, is ultimately each person’s and no one can truly force anyone to choose against his will. God has given that freedom and that responsibility to each of us and we all ultimately make it one way or the other. God counts a choice to not choose either way as a choice against him because he requires a positive choice to believe in and accept him and his only begotten son Jesus Christ to gain salvation. As long as you are alive, you can make or change that decision, but you are stuck with the last decision that you made before death. You cannot change your decision after death. A person might think that he will put off that decision until just before death and then choose God (I have met some like this), so he can live the way that he desires for most of his life and then still be saved. The problem with that way of thinking is that people sometimes die quickly without warning, so that person might not get the chance to make the decision for God and salvation. Of course, the idea that any of us can be free to live our lives as we please is not true. We are made to serve God and if a person leaves God, he ultimately gives him over to Satin to rule over him and he will serve him although he may not know it at the time. I did not see the similarities of belief and behavior of those that don’t believe in God until I crossed over to God, but now I see the similarities within each of the two groups (those that believe in God tend to have similar behaviors to each other and those that don’t believe in him have similar behaviors to each other). This is somewhat masked, however by those that are either leaving God, but have not yet completely left him and those who are coming to him, but have not yet come all the way to him. The only true free choice we have is the choice of whom we will serve. Even in our daily lives we find that we are not in control of many things and this causes the desire for pleasure that generally is at the center stage for those that do not believe to often be unfulfilled. In this world it generally takes a lot of hard labor to make the things that give us pleasure. A large part of the life of the average unbeliever tends to be spent in working hard to make such things and is unpleasurable and thus meaningless to him. Only those few who are at the top of the social and wealth structure are in a position to come close to doing all that they desire and they even find that they are limited by lack of ability to do things that they desire to do and by bad things that still happen to them regardless of their position. Those that are successful in giving their lives over to pleasure often after some time find their lives to be empty and void of any real meaning or purpose. These often attempt to escape through the use of drugs or liquor. In general, the more intelligent a person is, the more likely he is to perceive such things in his life and be unhappy. The world seems to be designed to work against a life based on maximum pleasure as a viable concept. I have been on both sides of the conflict at different times and am expressing what I have seen, both in myself and in others. I hope that this helps you to understand that although I do realize that you have the right to believe and to express your beliefs as you will and I believe we all have those rights given to us by God along with the responsibility to choose who to serve, I still am compelled by my compassion for you and others to do what I can (while still respecting your rights) to provide all the information that I can to encourage as many as I can to make the choice to be saved.
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