From: "Spike Jones" <spike66@attglobal.net>
> Amara has so aptly described
> the feeling as staring into the abyss until it stares back.
When it stares back, does that make it a closed system?
> The students did eventually agree on this mind boggling point,
> so we then asked ourselves what if the universe is open?
> I dropped out at that point, saying that this possibility is too
> sad to even consider. {8-] spike
How can we know if reality is open or closed, and also determine if we live in
a simulation?
Nasruddin puzzled himself thus:
"Last night I dreamed that I was a butterfly. It was such a lucid dream that
now I can't decide whether I'm a man who dreamed of being a butterfly, or a
butterfly dreaming that she is a man."
"That's easy," replied Nasruddin to himself. If something has a beginning and
end, then it's only a dream, it's just a story, a piece of fiction. That which
has no beginning and no end is reality. Naturally, this makes sense only to
someone who has direct experience of that which has no beginning and no end,
IOW, reality.
The description you've provided of closed system cosmos looks mighty
fine to me, Spike, and I really appreciate the way you filled in the standard
details. Do you really think open-endedness so sad? What prevents reality
being so energetically open that it's infinite in all directions (a little
Dysonese there), including hyperspace, so that it includes an infinite number
of *closed* universes/multiverses? Reality open at both ends means open
topographically and temporally, a hyper-spacetime continuum that's open to the
infinitesimal as well as the infinite, and the past as well as the future.
Color me contraire, but an "open" system that has a definite beginning and
infinite future doesn't seem as open as one with no beginning and no end.
As a theory of everything, Eternal Recurrence seems somehow anti-climactic,
and disappointingly free of math, but then intelligence needs reality much
more than reality needs intelligence, so we can't expect existence to
entertain intelligence forever (only stoned couch potatoes and sf fanatics
expect that).
"I have stared into the abyss, and it is us."
--Pogo's sister, Gopo
τΏτ
Stay hungry,
--J. R.
Useless hypotheses:
consciousness, phlogiston, philosophy, vitalism, mind, free will, qualia,
analog computing, cultural relativism
Everything that can happen has already happened, not just once,
but an infinite number of times, and will continue to do so forever.
(Everything that can happen = more than anyone can imagine.)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:59:45 MDT