Questions we'll never solve

[PoeticUniverse]

Heisenberg perhaps thwarted the German nuclear effort, for he gave a drawing to Bohr that scientist at Los Alamos noted could never work.

I hadn't come across this snippet of historical gossip. I just thought Adolf didn't get his bomb because Werner wasn't smart enough. Since he had previously successfully managed to pass off a simple statement of the bloody obvious as a message of profound truth he was maybe smarter than I thought he was.

It's part speculation:

HOW THE ALLIES WON WORLD WAR II

Warner Heisenberg, the head of
The German Nuclear Weapons Effort,
Was full of the uncertainty
That he had discovered in physics.

Heisenberg was entangled with his old mentor,
The Danish physicist Neils Bohr,
They being old friends, like father and son.

They were also supposed to be enemies,
For Germany now occupied Denmark.

Together they had created a physics
Of deep truth and beauty,
For beauty was the expression of truth.

They also made possible the physics
To destroy large cities, even the entire world.

In 1941, Heisenberg went to see Bohr,
The ‘Father of Quantum Mechanics’,
In Copenhagen, Denmark,
But we don’t know what they discussed,
Yet Germany failed to complete its work
To build an atomic bomb.

Did Heisenberg deliberately withhold
Information from the Nazis?
Did this consummate mathematician
Neglect to perform an obvious calculation?

Did he, with Bohr, form a complimentary pair,
Joining their views of the political position
Versus its velocity to form a complete picture of reality?

Did a man’s heart turn the tide of war?


The Drawing

On September 9th, 1943,
Neil’s Bohr walked to a meeting place
Near the water and crawled
In complete darkness to a beach,
For the Gestapo in Copenhagen
Were about to arrest him.

He secretly crossed the Oresund to Sweden
And remained there until October 6th,
Wherefrom the British flew him to Scotland.

That evening, Sir John Anderson
Gave Bohr a briefing on just how far
The Anglo-American Atomic Bomb Program
Had progressed.

Also, Fermi’s reactor had begun operating
On December 2, 1942.

Bohr was shocked, for he knew that only
The very rare isotope uranium 235 had fissioned
In the German Hahn-Strassman experiments.

This was fully two years after
Bohr had met with Heisenberg in occupied Denmark.

What had the Germans done during this time?

No wonder Bohr was alarmed.

And yet Bohr somehow
Had a drawing of the German nuclear reactor,
Which at first he thought might be the weapon itself.

All knew that plutonium,
Which does not exist naturally,
Could be chemically separated
From its uranium matrix
After bombarding a reactor’s
Uranium fuel rods with neutrons.

The critical mass was not in tons but in pounds,
Thus prompting the allied effort,
Not so much Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt.

Bohr went to work at Los Alamos
Where Oppenheimer was orchestrating
The impossible from 1943-1945.

On New Year’s eve of 1943,
Scientists looked at Bohr’s drawing
Of Heisenberg’s nuclear reactor
In Oppenheimer’s office.

Within two days, General Groves,
The military commander of the project,
Received a document beginning with

“The proposed pile [reactor] consists of
Uranium sheets immersed into heavy water.”

And ended with

“The arrangement [the drawing] suggested to you
By Bohr would be a quite useless military weapon.”

By late 1943, nearly everyone
In the German nuclear program,
With the exception of Heisenberg,
Had become convinced that uranium plates
Were inferior to a design using rods or cubes,
For the most efficient design
Involves separated lumps of uranium
Embedded in a lattice within the ‘moderator’;
But the worst possible solution
Is placing uranium in sheets or layers.

The role of the ‘moderator’
Is to slow down the fissioned neutrons,
With only heavy water or carbon
Seemingly being feasible.

The Germans had chosen heavy water,
Its separation from ordinary water
An expensive and difficult process,
Since carbon graphite is rendered useless
By an impurity of as little
As one part boron in 500,000.

At Los Alamos, Leo Szilard was a fanatic
About the purity of the graphite,
And since it was readily available
They decided to use it for carbon.

The dragon’s breath was to be unleashed.

None of the German reactors ever even operated.

Where did Bohr’s drawing come from,
For it had “Made in Germany” written all over it?

It could have only come from Heisenberg.


The Further Whims of Fate

In 1935, Fermi had almost discovered fission
Three years earlier than Hahn-Strassman,
But in order to shield the detectors
From unwanted radiation
From the slow-neutron process
He had covered the uranium target
With aluminum foil.

This prevented him from seeing
The very energetic pulses
From the uranium fission that was taking place.

Thus the race to build an atomic bomb
Might well have started in 1935 rather than 1939.

If so, World War II could have been nuclear
From the beginning or even have become a cold war—
All of this not happening because of some aluminum foil!

[Obvious Leo]

Did a man’s heart turn the tide of war?

I'd like to think so. Thank you for your little history lesson, some of which was known to me and some not. I've always derived a lot of malicious pleasure in taking the piss out of Heisenberg in my essays but never without mixed feelings. There's no question that he was a metaphysical dunderhead and his naive and uncritical acceptance of the Minkowski "block" ultimately did his science a great deal of harm. However there was another side to Werner which was really quite appealing. He was fiercely loyal to his friends but he never lost his respect for Einstein as a result of this. He knew that Albert was onto something with his spooky action at a distance and he never forgot that the 1927 Solvay conference had failed to resolve the "problem of the observer". He famously said that QM could not be regarded as a true model of our world because it had yet to pass successfully through the prism of our human consciousness. This was a deeply insightful statement for a scientist to make at the time but it somehow got lost in all the frenetic hullabaloo of war and conquest which followed the German economic catastrophes of the 1930s. For various reasons these metaphysical questions of physics were never revisited after WWII as the technocrats took charge of future directions. Still we have no unification model for physics , Austin, or do we?

Maybe Omar was right.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

[PoeticUniverse]

5. Is there life after death?

No, for all that one is and has become is embodied in the brain. There is no brain-body problem, for the brain is of the body.

We do so much deserve reward beyond this role—
And so it is that one’s immortal spirit-soul,
That angelic vapour that drives a living being,
Shall go forth to glory on, beyond this scene.

— Austin

It has been suggested/claimed/proposed/stated there might be a ‘soul’ that duplicates the evolutionary expensive brain so that it can travel to Heaven, Hell, Limbo, or Purgatory after death. Such ideas don’t really show anything.

We bless the needed soul with the holy kiss
Of life, being this of which to replace us with;
For what did natural selection ever do, in vain,
Spending so extravagantly on the higher brain?

It’s easy to pronounce and declare the wish
That a soul does that and a soul does this,
But the soul has nothing which to do it with;
So we give it a mind, heart, depth and width.

— Austin

The Symphony of Life

All that we know, even the loveliest and the best,
Decomposes into the dust of earth compressed.
The songs of all composed there lie in repose;
With this dust the future will arrange and recompose.

— Austin


6. Can you really experience anything objectively?

No, for brain quaila consist of re-presentations. Only our senses come close to meeting the objective reality that is really out there (which we know because because we have senses to detect it).


7. What is the best moral system?

It’s relative to what a particular society comes up with.


8. What are numbers?

They were invented as shorthand labels for the amount of people, animals, trees, stones, and other objects, these numbers leading on to arithmetic, and higher math, to which the regularities of nature are often amenable.


9. Is there really a free lunch?

The Impossible Recipe

Explaining the Cosmos is as easy as pie:
It’s an endless extravagance beyond the sky,
Which shows that matter’s very readily made—
Underlying energy raising the shades.

This All sounds rather like the ultimate free lunch,
For the basis is already made, with no punch,
It ever being around, as is, never a ‘was’—
Everywhere, in great abundance quite unheard of.

There’s even more of it than can be imagined—
Of lavish big spenders, there in amounts unbounded:
Bubbles of universes within pockets more,
Across all the times and spaces beyond our shore!

What is the birthing source of this tremendous weight?
There is nothing from which to make the causeless cake!
Its nature is undirected, uncooked, unbaked?
There can’t be a choice to that ne’er born nor awaked!

There can’t be turtles on turtles all the way down;
The buck has to stop somewhere in this town.
‘Nothing’ is unproductive—can’t even be meant;
All ever needed is, with nothing on it spent!

Yes, none from nothing, yet something is here, true;
But, really, you can’t have your cake and Edith, too!
And yet I’ve still all of my wedding cake, I do—
It’s just changed form; what ever IS can never go.

Since there’s no point at which to impart direction
The essence would have no limited, specific,
Certain, designed, created, crafted, thought out meaning!
Thus the Great IS is anything and everything!

This All is as useless as Babel’s Library
Of all possible books in all variety!
Yes, and even in our own small aisle we see
Any and every manner of diversity.

The information content of Everything
Would be the same as that of Nothing!
Zero. The bake’s ingredients vary widely,
And so express themselves accordingly.

What’s Everything, detailed? Length, width, depth, 4D—
Your world-line; 5th, all your probable futures;
6th, jump to any; 7th, all Big Bang starts to ends;
8th, all universes’ lines; 9th, jump to any;
10th, the IS of all possible realities.

Your elucidation is quite a piece of cake!
Yo, it exceeds, as well, and so it takes the cake.
Everything ever must be, because ‘nothing’ can’t?
Yes, it’s that existence has no opposite, Kant!

So, we’re here at the mouth of the horn of plenty,
For a free breakfast, lunch, and a dinner party;
Yet many starving are fed up with being unfed.
Alas, for now I have to say, Let Them Eat Cake!

[Obvious Leo]

All that we know, even the loveliest and the best,
Decomposes into the dust of earth compressed.
The songs of all composed there lie in repose;
With this dust the future will arrange and recompose.

The pre-Socratics beat you to the punch, mate, but only by a few thousand years so your plagiarism can be forgiven.

All things originate from one another,
and vanish into one another
according to necessity.....
in conformity with the order of time.

Anaximander, "On Nature"

Charles Darwin might also claim to be the author of your story before you, Austin, but Chuck got himself a bit confuddled on the detail.

[PoeticUniverse]

The pre-Socratics beat you to the punch, mate…

Cloudbursts wash the faces of the tulips,
As wine cleanses you, pouring through thy lips.
All becomes of light, dust, water, and air,
As in the meadow grown from your eclipse.


Next time: What is time?

[PoeticUniverse]

10. What is time?

Time is an interval and thus it is discrete rather than continuous and infinitely divisible, which would allow Zeno’s turtle to catch the hare.

The incredibly short Planck time is what we can measure, apparently, and I suppose this interval could even be shorter; however, and whichever, it is the ‘now’ at that seemingly bottommost level.

The ‘now’ that we perceive psychologically is longer, on the order of a fraction of a second.

The Now is only of the present, in that the past ‘now’ that was just previous completely vanishes, as well as its components, in and of the construction toward and of the next present Now, for the present and only Now is the output which can only be made from those inputs that were previous, and thus, the Now has great primacy, and we can stress that Now is all there is, the past not being kept anywhere, and the future not yet manufactured, all in keeping with What IS being of the present tense, it necessarily being ever, with no beginning or end, as no ‘was’ or ‘will be’, since the IS cannot arise out of Nothing.

Memory’s ideas recall the last heard tone,
Sensation savors what is presently known,
Imagination anticipates coming sounds
The delight is such that none could produce alone.

— Austin

Gone, then, is the notion of a ‘block-universe’, in which both the future and the past exist, as if it was constructed all at once, although it’s interesting to explore that the hinted all-at-oneness of What IS in a superposition made the path of our universe instantly, it now just playing out as a broadcast at the speed of light.

So, is all history lost? Well, yes and no, for the Cosmos/IS, being ever, may transform again and again into nearly of exactly the same happenings eventually, even may such at the same time, depending on how fine the resolution of reality is; thus, in this way, the Cosmos retains its own history by running through it again, as there is all eternity for it to do so.

On the other hand, there may become preferred paths that the transformation go through, perhaps because they are not inert and so keep on going, if this does anything to place them foremost.

So, rather than some impossible foreseeing of what paths will amount to something, say life, due to some Great Genius, I’m suggesting that a kind of brute force going down all paths, maybe even at once, such as the electrons in photosynthesis do to achieve 95% efficiency, is guaranteed to find working solutions moreso than even a Seer, whose position is also unlikely in the simple days before time allows for more complexity, such as that of a system of mind.

So, we have that What IS goes through its transformations restrained from precipitous actions by patient time, which is seemingly numbingly slow in evolutionary terms—a rather long yardstick of billions upon billions of years that tends to stick in our throats but that how it is, and this again suggests a making as it goes rather than an initial blueprint for all future being applied within a few days.

All’s thanks to Death’s prolonged sifting of ‘dies’,
Of the rest from the best, silly from wise,
The pointless from the pointed—selection.
Oh, through ink-black rivers we had to rise!

Our blind-fated path was the further paved,
When disasters finished most of the species.
Far from a feature of Intelligent Design,
It opened up the space that was needed.

Death is the ultimate evaluator—
The director of all evolutionary progress.
Death selects the wise from the silly;
Death chooses the useful from the useless.

All that we are we owe to time, death, and stars.
Truly, from the stars cometh our help.
Within a star’s heart, matter transforms itself
And gives off energy—this is why the stars shine!

Life’s birthright, long signed by time, dust, & death,
Doth also serve, for the Earth’s living quests,
As the epitaph: RIP; time wears,
The tips of the strands rip, tear; dust is left.

If we were angels, life would be so just;
Instead, we try, we push, we climb, we lust,
We dance, we dream, we feel, and love with zest;
Yes, all this, thanks to the beast within us!

— Austin

Time, then, is a difference between stages, and, conversely, stages are a difference between times. If there is no difference, or change, then there is no time passing, yet it seems that something must always change, with Stillness prohibited. Time must ever move forward.

Hopes flitter and flutter like butterflies—
Whose forms show there can be a second guise,
Although still one chained to time’s sovernty.
We cannot fly through time’s skies two-way wise.

Let thou thy certainty of the present be
Held mortgage for the Deed of Futurity,
For tomorrow’s just a gleam from afar
And yesterday’s but a cold ash of thee.

— Austin

Leo has provided the rest on time in many of his posts.

Worries may not come true, and if they do,
Thus they would, and then in them you must stew.
Past imperfect points to a future tense,
Yet ever only Nows does the Wheel brew.

— Omar’s Bodleian Manuscript q #12 retransmogrified

Drink; your doom is to e’er sleep in the tomb,
Sans wine, friends, and love—as an empty whom;
Come close, I will lift the dark secret’s veil:
Never again can withered flowers bloom.

— Omar’s Bodleian Manuscript q #35 retransmogrified

At first, you sleep in thy dear mother’s womb;
At last, you sleep in the cold silent tomb.
In between, Life whispers a dream that says,
Wake, live, for the rose withers all too soon!

Throw not life to the breeze; draft this day known,
For yesterday’s winds have already blown
And future’s currents have not yet stirred.
Forget dead airs; now’s breath is all you own.

— Austin

There’s naught else but lone, resultant Nows.
No matter how one tries to shake from boughs
The fruits of truth from the Tree of Knowledge,
Computation makes not yet the morrows.

— Omar’s Bodleian Manuscript q #14 retransmogrified

Morning springs thee over the wasteland’s brink,
And on time’s sand you the oasis drink.
Life’s strange caravan through the desert winds,
Back toward Nothing; drink—afore the stars sink.

— Omar’s Bodleian Manuscript q #60 retransmogrified

[Obvious Leo]

Time is an interval and thus it is discrete rather than continuous and infinitely divisible, which would allow Zeno’s turtle to catch the hare.

This is the philosophy of the quantum, the simplest and most profound truth in the history of metaphysics. It beggars belief that in the 21st century this basic truth of the Eleatics has yet to penetrate the Thomist fog which underpins Newton's infinitesimals. It makes no difference whether it was Leibniz or Newton who invented the calculus but it certainly makes a difference whose understanding of the calculus was carried forward into the science of physics. Once again the wrong bloke won the argument because Newton was as wrong about the philosophical underpinnings of his classical mathematics as he was about the philosophical underpinnings of the Cartesian space he applied it in. These little fuck-ups are only to be expected when you're attempting to model the mind of a timeless being which doesn't exist so Isaac would have done better to stick to his alchemy and leave the science to the heavy lifters. The Dark Ages still aren't quite over yet because of this misanthropic moron.

The Now is only of the present, in that the past ‘now’ that was just previous completely vanishes, as well as its components, in and of the construction toward and of the next present Now, for the present and only Now is the output which can only be made from those inputs that were previous, and thus, the Now has great primacy, and we can stress that Now is all there is, the past not being kept anywhere, and the future not yet manufactured, all in keeping with What IS being of the present tense, it necessarily being ever, with no beginning or end, as no ‘was’ or ‘will be’, since the IS cannot arise out of Nothing.

But what is to become of the "necessary Being" if the bloody obvious is accepted as truth? The jihadis may be a little discombobulated to discover that they've been beheading the innocents for nothing. Who will play Giordano Bruno in this little drama, Austin, with the flames licking at the toes? Brush up om your Italian, mate, and say after me "Eppur si muove".

Gone, then, is the notion of a ‘block-universe’,

Einstein could never stand that arsehole Minkowski anyway so the "block" will go unmourned. The weird thing is that Albert himself NEVER bought the "block" story but carried on doing physics all his life "as if" it were true. In his frustrated search for a unification model he often referred to the fact that he was always working with an "as if" universe and therefore getting nowhere with it. He absolutely KNEW that it all went pear-shaped right back at SR but what he never saw was that he himself had failed to appreciate the significance of Michelson and Morley. It was space which was the deliberate and persistent illusion, not time.

this again suggests a making as it goes rather than an initial blueprint for all future being

The truth of reality is that "shit happens", Austin. This truth alone is sufficient to account for all the complexity in the universe, including you and me, because "complexity from chaos" is a mathematical truth as fundamental as 1+1=2. The universe evolves from the simple to the complex purely because it cannot do otherwise and the only law needed to ensure this is the meta-law of cause and effect. Our moments NOW must proceed in an orderly and self-generative fashion and that's all there is to it. Have a ToE.

Time, then, is a difference between stages, and, conversely, stages are a difference between times. If there is no difference, or change, then there is no time passing, yet it seems that something must always change, with Stillness prohibited. Time must ever move forward.

In my philosophy I simply equate time,change and causation as three different ways of expressing the same thing. It makes no ontological sense to maintain an artificial distinction between them and once gravity is brought into the picture the mechanism for self-causality is defined.

It takes a bit of getting used to but you are bound to the surface of the earth because time passes more quickly at your head than it does at your feet.

We cannot fly through time’s skies two-way wise.

No. Fractal dimensions are uni-directional. This means we only get one crack at life so give it your best shot.

Worries may not come true, and if they do,
Thus they would, and then in them you must stew.
Past imperfect points to a future tense,
Yet ever only Nows does the Wheel brew.

If your auntie had balls she'd be your uncle and what's done is done.

Forget dead airs; now’s breath is all you own.

This is a very Taoist truth which can gain a new currency in our modern world. Living in the moment and attempting to squeeze every last drop of meaning out of it is the best way to get your money's worth out of a mortal life but the only important point to remember is this one. This is NOT a trial run.

[PoeticUniverse]

Right on, Leo!

11. What is consciousness?

It’s a global end-state of the brain’s subconscious analysis, available at large, in which quaila represent the fine face painted upon reality. Quaila can be so because they are of the brain’s own evolved, invented symbolic language, its final and highest symbol born from an upward/sideward/feedback cascade from lower and lower brain modules, each outputting higher and higher symbols to the next.

In its reality mode, the quaila are full and sharp; whereas in imagination mode the quaila are at about 5-10% strength, which I estimated via lowering the transparency in Photoshop, probably so that we can’t mistake it for reality. Perhaps a schizophrenic having visions and/or hearing sounds seeming coming from elsewhere is dreaming or imagining with qualia at full strength due to some malfunction.

The brain’s global representations are useful for feedback into memory and for us to better know what’s going on in reality, which of course we can only know from the inside our, for all we ever truly ‘see’ is the inside of the head.

Another use for consciousness is to learn what may eventually become automatic, as well as for actionizing before committing to an action, which scenarios involve the CNS through the spine all the way unto the nerve spindles.

So, it was worth it for survival reasons for the brain to accomplish consciousness, and here we are.

Consciousness not some free-floating, stand-alone, magical thing that the ‘consciousness’ movement groups tout, nor all there is, as some might also declare, but is a brain process. We wouldn’t have senses if consciousness was all there were.

It provides all manner of cues and sensations, whether enjoyable or painful, and opens up reality to what can be experienced, letting us access what is within in the universe as well as what is within.

There are two useful kinds of views, which some claim is the reason for two brain hemispheres. Be that as it may, but surely we wouldn’t want to get lost in detail when there is a further, more panoramic, holistic view required, nor be stuck with the whole when close-up particulars need to be attended to.

When the corpus callosum is severed to provide relief for severe espy cases, sometimes each brain hemisphere becomes conscious through its own brain process, and although the hemispheres share the same brain stem, these two consciousnesses can be at odds with each other, with perhaps one hand picking up a knife to do harm, with the other hand trying to prevent it.

It seems that would be degrees of consciousness among the species. A snails brain and consciousness ability might consist of light and dark, wet and dry, hot and cold, and perhaps not a lot more.

Zombies? Well, there aren't any but in TV shows and movies, and therefore they are not the case, except that perhaps some lower species may come close.

Damasio, in ‘Self Comes to Mind’, has it that “There is indeed a self, but it is a process, not a thing, and the process is present at all times when we are presumed to be conscious. We can consider the self process from two vantage points. One is the vantage point of an observer appreciating a dynamic object—the dynamic object constituted by certain workings of minds, certain traits of behavior, and a certain history of life. The other vantage point is that of the self as knower, the process that gives a focus to our experiences and eventually lets us reflect on those experiences.”

“…is what allows the mind to know that such dominions exist and belong to their mental owners—body, mind, past and present, and all the rest—is that the perception of any of these items generates emotions and feelings, and, in turn, the feelings accomplish the separation between the contents that belong to the self and those that do not. From my perspective, such feelings operate as markers. They are the emotion-based signals I designate as somatic markers.”

“There is no dichotomy between self-as-object and self-as-knower; there is, rather, a continuity and progression. The self-as-knower is grounded on the self-as-object.”

“Consciousness is not merely about images in the mind. It is, in the very least, about an organization of mind contents centered on the organism that produces and motivates those contents.”

(I can put a bit more from Damasio if anyone wants it.)

HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS

The three lower consciousnesses that are
Obsessed with the securing of objects,
With the chasing of sensations, power
And control will never ever be enough.

There are No actions of people that can
Justify our becoming irritable
Angry, fearful, jealous or anxious if
We give them our unconditional love.

If we don’t accept the unacceptable,
Then we lower our level of consciousness;
Our response will mirror their uptightness—
Which can spread the bad moods onto others.

Conscious Awareness, which can but witness,
Is a safe haven from which to observe
The drama of our lives playing in our minds,
Granting us a sobering distance from it.

From a safe subjective place that’s free of fear,
Our soul, our conscious awareness, can witness
The strange thoughts and emotions that surface
On the mind, sent by the subconscious brain.

Putting ourselves in the place of others
When hurtful things are done to us
Expands our consciousness, compassion, and love,
Since we can come to know why they did it.

When we converse with ourselves it is our
Higher Consciousness—our Conscious Awareness
Or I that questions our lower consciousness
Impulses toward securing, sensation, and power.

Seeing the big picture of life and its stages
And connections lets one not get annoyed, say,
At being cut off in traffic, for they
May be old, learning, lost, growing, or angry.

Putting the needs of others ahead of
Our own produces the byproduct of
Happiness and reduces stress, for we
No longer have unrealistic expectations.

…

There’s No Life in the dead past, just history,
Nor in the imagined future, a mystery,
But in the here and now life just arrives;
Its a gift—that’s why its called the present.

[Obvious Leo]

ts final and highest symbol born from an upward/sideward/feedback cascade from lower and lower brain modules, each outputting higher and higher symbols to the next.

Remembering always that the causal cascade operates both top-down and bottom-up throughout these nested hierarchies. Your sore head makes you feel depressed but your depression makes your head sore.

In its reality mode, the quaila are full and sharp; whereas in imagination mode the quaila are at about 5-10% strength,

In the neural network computation model of modern cognitive neuroscience this is spoken of in terms of synaptic "action potentials" where signal strengths are given variable values. This explains why you can never predict what a mind will do, even if it's your own!

all we ever truly ‘see’ is the inside of the head.

It's the loneliest place in the universe, Austin, so it pays to find our way around it.

(I can put a bit more from Damasio if anyone wants it.)

I've read all of Damasio's work and I'm as big a fan as you are. I'd recommend him to anybody interested in the most cutting edge developments in the philosophy of mind, as I would anything deriving from the Santiago School of embodied cognition. Consciousness as process is nowadays regarded as mainstream and the "self-made man" actually means something. We quite literally make ourselves who we are through autopoietic cognition. Mind you Socrates knew all this millennia ago without the benefit of MRI.

[PoeticUniverse]

It's the loneliest place in the universe, Austin, so it pays to find our way around it.

I can never share a mind directly,
For there is no access; we are alone.
Mind melding works only for the Vulcans.
This loneliness leads us to company.

The unbearable solitude of consciousness
Is relieved by literature, social clubs,
Movies, caring, friendships, discussion, writing,
And other sharing acts, but, mostly, by love.

[PoeticUniverse]

12. Can there be an actual infinity?

OK, the question already rules out potential infinities such as employed in math, so the question asks if the extent of something physical and existing (‘eternity’ pertains to duration) can be without end and limitless, that is, nonfinite. Note that it doesn’t refer to an extent that is finite but boundless, such as the surface of a sphere.

The answer is ‘No’, for an extent that cannot be capped can’t both actually be there in it’s infinite entirety and still keep on going and getting larger without end because more can always be added to the infinite with these additions never ending.

So, ‘infinity’ really indicates an extent or an amount that can never be completed to be infinite; but people, being human, in their infinite wisdom, may disregard the meaning of the word, and let the word alone take on a life of its own by claiming that something is indeed infinite in its size or number.

So, then, for example, the number of protons/electrons in the universe must be finite, this being estimated, roughly, as 2x10^76 electron/proton particles, the ‘2x’ there since there to account for both matter and antimatter.

Since there are 10^9 photons for every proton, that number of annihilations is roughly indicated, so that’s why the original count has to be reduced from original 2x10^85 to the 2x10^76 there are now, and of course the real count may vary, but we won’t bother to change the signage any more any more than we would the one in a natural history museum relating how many millions of years old the dinosaur bones are.

Suffice it to say that there is a humorous amount of stuff in the universe, seeming that nature is greatly extravagant big spender for some reason. As for how big in size things can get, more locally in the universe, it seems that it is whatever amount collapses upon itself to make a back hole.

As for how infinitesimal something can be, the Planck size appears to be the limit, which, by the way, seems to make for an absolute scale of size, at least on one end, which is enough.

Perhaps someone can do the math to find out if the size of the universe in magnitude matches the negative magnitude of the Plank size. Why? I don’t really know yet; maybe their matching tells us something. Then we can find out what things are mid-way. Why? I don’t know yet.

Maybe it’s like perhaps the Largest times the Smallest equals ‘1’ and we may find ourselves perched there at finite unity. I’m also guessing that the large is so Large because the small is so Small or that a universe really huge was what granted that life could appear already.

Further, now that we know there cannot be infinite density, then a certain finite limit was the breaking point for the Big Bang to go off. If infinite density were allowed, then the universe would not have begun, not even with a whisper.

Oh, those imaginings of what can’t be,
Such as Nought, Stillness, and Infinity,
As well as Random, Beginning and End,
Full Solidity, Unfixed Will, and He.

— Austin

[Hobbes' Choice]

HOW THE ALLIES WON WORLD WAR II

First Stalingrad then Kursk. Finally the invasion of Manchuria. Every thing else was a duck shoot.

[PoeticUniverse]

4. Does God exist?

I don’t know, but it’s not likely. ’God’ has not been established, and so the absence of evidence points to evidence of absence.

We note that composites and higher and higher complexities come about as time goes on, thus higher beings with more sophisticated systems of mind would form in the future, not back in the past, and certainly a system cannot be fundamental, for the parts of the system must precede. As such, the totally wrong direction is being looked to for higher beings, as well as the Highest.

All that IS can have no creation, and thus no Creator, for it cannot be made from Nothing, and thus it is ever, with no beginning, no choice, and no imparted direction.

The proposed template that life can only come from a Higher Life finds but one usage but then must be discarded lest it imply that a Higher Life can only come from a HIGHER LIFE, and so on, ad infinitum.

For more—interviews with the God Figments of my imagination:

https://austintorney.wordpress.com/2015 ... -the-gods/

[Obvious Leo]

As such, the totally wrong direction is being looked to for higher beings, as well as the Highest.

As the barmaid said to Albert.

Helga: Dr Einstein, do you believe in god?

Albert: Not yet, Fraulein.

[PoeticUniverse]

13. Are time machines possible?

No, but I’m now a second ahead of when I began this.

NO TIME MACHINES

It isn’t that no one ever came back
From the future to see us,
Although that is still a good reason
For no time machines being possible.

Nor is it that there can’t be
A future going on somewhere ahead of time,
As that’s a fine one, too.

It is that women prevented time machines
From being invented;
For every time a man said,
“Honey, I’m going out to the garage
To work on my time machine”
The woman in his life would reply
“That’s impossible, dear.
Stop wasting your time;
There is housework to be done
And grass to be cut.”

The man would still sneak out
To try to work on his time machine,
But the woman would find him
And once again say something like,
“That’s impossible, you nut head.
Get in here and do something useful!”

And that’s why there are no time machines!


At least there can be time capsules.


THE TIME CAPSULE

Since one million years had just passed by,
They of the future prepared to open, nigh,
The absolutely sealed container’s prize
Of the capsule made so carefully that it survived
Without damage, being totally impregnable
To any outside influence imaginable.

They expected to see perhaps some old relic,
But certainly nothing alive that could tell of it,
For it would be hard to imagine even then
That some organism could keep on living its ken
Over its course onto a million years later,
Sealed inside this tight container,
Unable even to exchange energy’s spark,
This metabolism being the hallmark
Of life and all that quacked or quarked…

And so they did not at all expect something
In there that would be flapping its wings,
Gasping for air, or anything at all of life’s song,
It wondering what had taken so long.

Well they were right and they were wrong,
For in the time capsule planted ago so long,
Several things had with it come along…

One was a plaque, of numbers low and high,
It containing some primes and pi;
Another, some essays of the future—
Some, like on this forum, quite mature,
Along with Darwin’s book, maps curled,
And many other items of the world
From those times when the oceans swirled;

But the last one, perhaps not intended,
Was a microbe—an extremophile,
Sitting there quite contented all the while!

Well they soon laughed, loud and long,
For they were in between right and wrong
As to what could survive from so long ago,
And it was really walking mighty slow!

Stunned, twice they had to look;
It had crawled right out of Darwin’s book.