joigus

John Wheeler was a great physicist, but not many people hold this view today. You should distinguish philosophical musings of physicists from robust physical principles. If you can't, I can't help you. Are you sure Wheeler said that? Let's see... Here's the quote, on page 28, not 27: https://books.google.es/books?hl=en&lr=&id=kF1INlvLSlkC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&ots=UjrGJqkzFz&sig=B4jeCsHB510EWT5axFKitak_4S0&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false That sounds to me more like a rhetorical question than the statement of a principle. And have you based your whole theory on a rhetorical question from John Wheeler? Rhetorical questions tend to be the weakest points in any argument. Anyway, my answer to that rhetorical question, and the answer from most scientists today is "no". There are other ways. So the quote is not "Observers are necessary to bring the Universe into being". (with capitals in "Universe"). The quote "as is" seems to come from Barrow&Tipler: http://www.dhushara.com/book/quantcos/anth/anth.htm Who apparently took a rhetorical question from Wheeler, made it into a "physical principle" and a few people out there went nuts with it. No serious science is made from this stuff. In any case, none of this has to do with the fact that you just copied and pasted standard equations from physics books to make your "paper" look like a genuine idea, as I pointed out. Neither Lorentz transformations, nor the geodesic equation, nor Einstein's equations derive from your idea. You just say the do.

Thank you all. I suppose it would take something really outrageous for me to use the report protocol. It's not me somehow. I even stopped giving people bad reputation points. I've noticed that the moderators on this site, after rational arguments have been presented, shift to shorter formulas to try and re-focus the conversation. You people spend a considerable effort and patience before someone is suspended or their post is closed. Those are good points. Ignoring other users should be a private, silent act. I'll try to remember that. But of course. That's very clever. Genuine disagreement, offering of arguments and counter-arguments, is very useful. I'm not as lucky as @swansont, who, in his own words, gets to play with "very expensive toys". My only laboratories are immediate reality and reason. Disagreeing with people in good faith is like a laboratory of sorts for me. I must confess I sometimes hold an opinion more strongly than my actual level of conviction is, just in order to see where my argument leads... That's part of the game. That's why we say "let me play devil's advocate here".

Sorry. I meant, obviously: (+1,-1,-1,-1). I hope I wasn't too confusing.

I've put three people on my ignore list in the last 48 hours. Am I a bad person? Could I have done otherwise? --> Possibility for a merging with Free Will discussion Am I missing the fun of discussing non-sense? Am I giving others more than their fair share of gibberish to deal with? Does this thread belong in Ethics?

Well put. +1

I was completely unaware of this. Thank you for opening that door into the weird for me. Sometimes I feel like I'm continually losing my innocence. I like to think that's a good thing. Here it is: I'm a little bit confused by the naught. But... Maybe Hanke was trying to make a further point that went over my head. I would rather say. Would a (-1,+1,+1,+1) universe be in any sense distinguishable from a (+1,-1,-1,-1), or a (-1,+1.-1,-1), etc.? Or signature-changing: (-1,+1,+1,+1) What makes the sign so special? And the particular parameter/coordinate that represents it? You can actually continually re-parametrize it and nobody would be any the wiser. This principle of indifference is whispering to our ear: Isn't there a fundamental decision about which coordinate in this continuum is the "selected" time for whatever characteristic determines what conscience is? And if so, which one is it? It must be one of them. And if not, if there is not a fundamental decision, what is it that makes the "special coordinate" so special in an inevitable way? A reshuffling of the basis entitles me in principle to decide that it's x that represents time in my mapping. x is x because I say so. x doesn't mean anything. It's just a mathematical tag. The mathematics speaks very clearly here. Invariance seems to suggest the opposite: There's nothing special about the time coordinate you pick, except it must be the only one with that sign in the metric. Looks appetising. Thank you.

I think @Markus Hanke has made an observation that is just pure genius. All of us, except @MigL have overlooked it. I'll bring it up to your attention ASAP and come back and try to take up the gauntlet he's thrown. Edit1: I'll bring it back to your attention. Maybe it was just me who wasn't paying attention. Edit2: Maybe it was just I. Dammit!! Very interesting. Now I understand much better, because you've brought this up before and I wasn't sure I completely understood.

Good points. +1. Let me add another one: There are more than two. Our mind tends to translate into binary if given the opportunity. Actually, there's a gradient of greys if you look at the picture closely enough. Our mind shapes what we see, and our mind likes to interpret the world in binary. Could that happen with time too? Our mind "likes" to shape the world as a continuous sequence?

Ok. You got your passageway. +1 We would have: A) The practical group: Why bother? B) The interested but not conviced: Mmmm, tell me more about it C) The 1st passageway: Goes from "why bother" to "tell me more about it" D) The puzzled or deeply concerned people: There's something special about time E) The 2nd passageway: Not convinced, but I have a funny feeling about time F) The unrestricted passageway: Goes from "why bother" to "there's something special about time" I'm selling out. <joke> You can add your own. For example: There's something spacial about being special </joke>

Well, I must tell you my choice of word, "hardliners" was not very fortunate. I should have written something like "practical". I would say you are practical, but then you seem to want to have a passageway to the stance "interested but not convinced". Is that any closer?

Brilliant observations. +1. Count me in.

That was brilliant! +1 <giggle> </giggle>

Nice post. +1 Here's mine: If you set the ratio: #(gauge bosons)/#(source fermions)=1090/1080=1010 which is approximately correct for the observable universe. And then raise it to the power: #(degrees of freedom of all known gauge sectors) = 1(EM)+3(EW)+8(QCD) = 12 You get: (1010)12 = 10120 which is the scale of the overcounting of the vacuum energy from QFT. Coincidence? I'll leave that one to @SergUpstart... LOL

I think I may venture a reason why the teacup example has proven to be so controversial: Human-made objects are generally designed with the hope that they last unchanged for as long as possible*. So you can go back to the handle, the spout, or whatever part and find it exactly the way it was before, except for a scratch or a slight discolouration. Consider, OTOH, the example of a metamorphosing insect somewhere along the causal line: egg, larva, caterpillar, pupa, butterfly. It's almost impossible to look at a caterpillar without picturing in your mind the butterfly to be that it represents: Our experience of the past deeply affects our thinking, and I would go on to say that in many cases leads us to some kind of circular-time representation space. This is the realm of inductive thinking. Laws that seem to suggest cycling and re-cycling in continually perpetuating process seeding and re-seeding. Cosmology imposes on us to stretch the concept of time to its very limits: Eternal inflation, accelerated expansion, thermal death. It's so tempting to try to make sense of time in this difficult context that many models try to embed them in some kind of cyclic time, which is the one we're so familiar with. Collapsing and recollapsing universes, multiverses, etc. The caterpillar-pupa-butterfly kind of universe. I may have got all of you completely wrong, but it seems to me that those who are closer to seeing time as an aspect of thinking that's so intrinsically hardwired in our brains that sort of impregnates everything we think, are: @Markus Hanke, @michel123456 , @MigL, and myself. I'm not so sure about @Eise, @geordief, @studiot, @The victorious truther, and @vexspits. Seems to me like they are more inquiring about other people's views. In particular, whether we identify time with any kind of differentiation. To the risk of misrepresenting them, I would say they're interested but not convinced. Then there's the "hardliners" if you will, represented by @Phi for All, @Strange, and @StringJunky who, to the risk of oversimplifying their views, go more like: I don't see what the problem is, what's soooo special about time. Time is just a factual aspect of physics. Get over it. Then there's @iNow, who seems to line up with "us", the puzzled-by-time bunch, by quoting Sagan. This is not to say that within these groups everyone agrees with everyone else. And again, I'm not sure whether I've represented you faithfully. Please, feel free to correct me. --------------------- * Planned obsolescence aside

No. Suppose I completely reject any notion of free will (which I don't). It's possible to say: 1) There is no free will 2) The question of free will has nothing to do with determinism Where is the contradiction? I'll get back to your other points later. Although, I must tell you hastiness when dealing with a complicated problem has nothing to do with how much time you spend later insisting on your hasty proposition. That doesn't prove that Dennett's concept of free will is hasty, but possible it is. I've heard Dennett say that he's deeply concerned about people running away with the idea that we're not free and the consequences on society. What I meant is that he's just a little bit too willing to approve a concept of free will that's a practical compromise that's useful in society. I suppose I will deal with your main points. Although I'd rather have more time to think about them. If there were a graded notion of free will, going from the "bottom" made up of people with serious neurological disorders and the like (let's say a Charles Manson) up to the top, made up of people with high level of responsibility, honesty; both intellectual and behavioural (let's say an Eise, or a Dennett); where exactly would we draw the line? The spectrum would be complicated, more similar to what I think it is the isomophism with reality that good theories should be demanded to have. So criteria would be needed to decide, so to speak, how much free will you lose from suffering PTSD, for example. The other idea, a switch to declare the split of humanity between free agents and non-free, based on whether they can take decisions based on just internal system of ethical checks and balances instead of external conditionings, is, to me, a bit "hasty". By that I suppose I mean: Not as satisfactorily thought out as other concepts by the same philosopher. Humility for those who are free I think is the main point. Something like: Don't think so highly of yourself, your proteins are doing it. That's all. An ultimate frontier of intellectual humility for those who have been fortunate enough to become respectable members of this society. Something like: Hey, don't boast so much that you're a free agent, had you been born as a sickly orphan, son of a poor Peruvian copper miner, with no money, no health, no wealth, no hope of any of it, you would probably be stealing apples in the market. Or worse.

Being wrong requires making sense. Bye.

Not even plastic surgeons can do that. You're 1 non-sensical/non-sequitur comment away from my ignore list. Time is indeed precious.

Fine-grained, or microscopic entropy, never changes. It's a constant. It's the volume of phase space; a measure of how much information is in the system. That's called Liouville's theorem. Dynamical systems conserve the distinctions, the amount of information. It's just that evolution always de-correlates most of your system's dynamical variables with the "macroscopic handles" you may establish to study it (volume, pressure, fields). So most of this dynamical information is lost for your macroscopic "description handles", in my figure of speech. Coarse-grained, or macroscopic entropy, always increases for closed systems. Time? You're trying to take too big a leap here. Time has to do with entropy growth (its direction), but it's not defined by it. Time doesn't stop. What makes you think it does? The grandfather paradox has to do with geometry of space-time, not with entropy. What's that about???

That's not what I said. "Reverse entropy" doesn't make any sense. You must mean "reverse entropy change". How could it define time? Entropy doesn't define time.

Nobody says that. That's not how you formulate irreversibility. No. It's a measure of ignorance or "randomness" if you will. And yours is going through the roof.

My concept of information comes from Shannon, which fits the definition of entropy given by Boltzmann (information deficit). There are other definitions of entropy that are more useful in different contexts and are qualitatively equivalent. None of those do I recognize in what you say. For example, you've got Rényi entropy: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1102.2098.pdf In some respects it's a more solid definition, meaning that in some systems for which Boltzmann entropy is not well defined, Rényi entropy is. And you still haven't answered: What's the connection between time and entropy? Information defines a thermodynamic arrow of time, but not its units. Another thing you haven't answered: Nature goes from more information to less information. It's the opposite of what you suggested.

I'm not aware that you've accepted any guidance here. Please, correct me if I'm wrong. You've just pressed your initial point while ignoring all the counter-arguments. Can you show that? I'm not convinced. "It needs to be consistent" is obviously not good enough. I don't think that's what the Einstein transformation of velocities implies.

Neither am I. It's about consistency. I use irony as a tool. Irony is a universal language and helps you make a point. I'm not convinced by your concept of time as information. I don't think you've thought it through.

I think you just put your finger on it. It's definitely a flaw of information we're talking about.

Devil DNA and enzymes are hard to come by. Also, an expedition to Hell to pick up samples is bound to be costly and dangerous.