Philosophy Now Forum

Dontaskme wrote: I can identify with everything you've said with compassion and empathy, my fellow human.

Well that just felt like a big cosmic hug! Thank you!

Dontaskme wrote: I'm also intrigued why some are able to see through the illusion while others don't or don't want to admit it.

It is baffling... how people sharing the same physical space, can see such different things. I guess this is what further formed my perspective that there is no ultimate reality... and no right way of being. And, in fact, realizing how vast these experiences can be, and how much more there is undoubtedly available to be experienced, points to the magnificent "glory" of all creation and infinite possibility. I mean WOW... how big is that? How limitless is that? If that doesn't spur enthusiasm for seeing what one can do with energy and experiences, I don't know what will.

Dontaskme wrote: Never dabbled in consciousness altering substances, didn't need them, was a natural high, still am kind of person.

I can truly relate, as I don't think they're NEEDED at all. It happened to be what I fell into at the time while going to Grateful Dead shows with my ex-husband. And I think it helped me process and break free of my Christian upbringing. These days, like you... I don't partake in anything... except maybe some occasional drink with friends. There is nothing like a naturally high. It's inspiring to hear that you know/live it, and always have!

Dontaskme wrote: Couldn't cope with any more surprises especially if they are pleasurable, Can't take too much of that stuff...lol.

If you are saying what I think you're saying... holy cow, I am right there with ya! There are times I feel so full of joy/bliss/love that I feel like I'll evaporate into thin air. As much as I want to experience another level of being... I've also been afraid for awhile, that I couldn't handle how good that would feel! I've gotten more used to the idea now though... so we'll see what happens.

Dontaskme wrote:...once I was suddenly surrounded by the most unbelievable serene,blissful calming, warming most divine presence of pure love ..after a traumatic experience....funny how that happens to us, and wonder where that comes from. But it's proves one thing, there is nothing ever to fear in life, I've heard dying soldiers on the battle field talk of this too just as they are about to die. It appears that all is well at all times. Life is a gift, certainly.

Yes it is... and that kind of experience you described is so beautiful. I wish I knew how to give everyone a glimpse of that if they've not had it. It's just so far beyond most religion. I think that's why it gets me goin' when religious people try to righteously tell me how uniquely divine they are while their behavior screams of hate and separation. How can they not see what they're doing? And they clearly have no comprehension of what else there is beyond what they see, nor are they open to such a potential! I'm torn between feeling compassion for them and not wanting to engage with them at all... 'cause it feels too toxic to be around.

Dontaskme wrote: When you say ''But I often think of leaving here... and dancing my energy off somewhere else'' I think why bother, you'll only get same where ever you go, might as well stay where you are, there is nowhere to go anyway...

Well, isn't there something to be said for seeking like-minded souls to keep me reminded and steeped in that which feels light and true... rather than wallowing around in the snake pit, biting each other's heads off (as entertaining as that may be)?

Dontaskme wrote:Some belief systems flow together effortlessly' mix and blend as they move toward the ocean. While other belief systems clash violently making groaning and grinding sounds as they move effortlessly toward the ocean. Such is the nature of human interaction...it is what it is...life dancing it's dance.

Yes indeed! I have learned much here... with all the groaning and grinding. It is a magnificent dance. In the end, we all flow back into the ocean and (I believe) are indistinguishable. How's that for togetherness?! What if we could actually enjoy more of that connectivity and oneness while we're here?

Greta wrote:

Obvious Leo wrote:

Greta wrote: You have often spoken of work being done on non-linear fractal systems, though. Isn't that physics-related work concerning growth?

Unfortunately not. Physics is the ONLY science which is wholly unable to model its empirical data by using the tools of fractal geometry

Maybe that is changing? http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/new ... ntum-realm

In a small way, yes, but theorists in the field of fractals are few and far between and still mostly regarded as being dabblers in fringe science. It uses a completely different suite of mathematical tools from those deployed in mainstream physics and the two sets of tools simply cannot be used in conjunction with each other, although curiously the metric tensor field equations of GR are partially non-linear

http://www.nature.com/news/physicists-n ... ly-1.13717

Obvious Leo wrote:On the other hand Minkowski modelled time in the Cartesian space, which because of its bi-directionality left physics with models of reality which are time invariant, which reality is self-evidently not.

On the other hand, we can at least gain some information from a series of snapshots.

I've never denied it. The "sequence of snapshots" methodology of the block universe has proven itself time and time again as a powerful predictive tool. However it can never have any explanatory authority because of its a priori metaphysical flaw. Time is stubbornly NOT a bi-directional dimension and no amount of predictive success can ever change this. Once again physics is forced to acknowledge that at least some of its so-called "laws" are not time time invariant, most notably gravity, the second law of thermodynamics and the weak nuclear force.

Again, while Googling some of your ideas I came across something you might enjoy. J.Theiler: Estimating the Fractal Dimension of Chaotic Time Series https://www.ll.mit.edu/publications/jou ... actals.pdf. I don't understand it but you might, but it does appear to be an attempt at physically modelling and trying to predict fractals.

Predicting the outcome of any chaotic process has forever been acknowledged as only possible to a finite order of probability, which should sound hauntingly familiar to any student of subatomic physics. However the predictive uncertainty is entirely due to the complexity of the causal dynamics of the entire system and has nothing whatsoever to do with the metaphysically ludicrous notion of the uncaused event, as is claimed in traditional QM. If you think carefully about this you'll see that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is precisely analogous to the 3-body problem first identified by Isaac Newton as an inevitable consequence of Galilean relativity.

Try this as a thought experiment. Imagine a universe with only two cosmological bodies in it which we'll call the sun and the earth. It makes no sense to specify which is orbiting which because they simple orbit each other and thus their locations relative to each other can be easily defined. However you need add only one further body to this system, the moon, and all bets are off. Each of these three bodies is now causally determining the relativistic motion of the other two which means that the location and momentum of any one of these bodies cannot be precisely defined with respect to both of the other two at the same time. At any given point in time its "location" relative to one cannot possibly hold true for its location relative to the other because all three of these bodies are in constant motion. These spatial locations are thus relevant only to a fixed and immutable background space which Einstein proved in GR was a myth. However QM is not predicated on GR. QM is firmly grounded in the gravityless world of SR where the immutable background space is accepted as an a priori assumption even though it is known to be false. This effectively defines quantum gravity as a non-problem because the Standard Model completely ignores this fundamental truth about relativistic motion. Relativity completely explains why the Schrodinger wave function yields precise predictions only for the hydrogen atom and not for any other atom. The hydrogen atom is a 2 body system and subatomic particles are subject to the same "laws of motion" as are any other physical entities in the universe. It is actually relativistic gravitational motion which is determining the behaviour of the subatomic particles and all the various properties which they exhibit as a consequence of this process are emergent. In non-linear dynamic systems theory ALL emergent properties are defined as purely phenomenal and thus observer defined constructs, as both Leibniz and Kant pointed out centuries ago. So too is the immutable background space.

Obvious Leo wrote:This has basically been the case throughout most of the 20th century, starting out with the pioneering work of Bogdanov. Von Bertalanffy was possibly the first formal systems theorist in biology but the true mathematical modelling was mostly the work of the information theorists, notably von Neumann, Shannon, Conway, Turing, Weiner, and crucially Mandelbrot. In chemistry the major figures were Onsager and Prigogine, both of whom won Nobels for their work in molecular evolution and both of whom were completely ignored by physics, because a universe in which entropy decreases is not one which their spacetime paradigm can encompass, even though such a universe is quite obviously the one we happen to inhabit.

This is a very old battle, isn't it? All the way through the evolution of classical physics another physics has been evolving concurrently with its own chain of champions. I have generally thought you a lone operator but can see that you are simply backing a chain of dissidents examining reality from a different perspective, one that they and you believe is closer to reality. The lack of time in parts of classical physics certainly is an obvious issue.

Rather than seeing this as a new physics I prefer to see it as a more coherent interpretation of the existing physics. The way I describe it is as an ontological underpinning for the current epistemology. However you're right when you describe it as a very ancient battle. This is the same battle that Leibniz had with Newton and that Mach and Poincare had with Einstein. The problem with physics is not actually a problem of physics at all but a problem with understanding what physics is and is not able to tell us about the nature of physical reality. For decades I've been a pariah in physics forums but you're perfectly right when you suggest that I am not alone. Smolin is the most prominent amongst the current dissenters but over the past century there have been many others. Most significantly there are many amongst the modern clique of theorists who have finally come to realise that no true cosmological model can ever be attained which fails to explain the existence of life and mind in our universe. This group includes Paul Davies, Frank Wilczek, Jakob Bekenstein (rip), Sean Carroll, Carlo Rovelli, Lisa Randall, and a number of others who could scarcely be categorised as bleeding edge crackpots.

The fact that on the cosmological scale the entropy balance in our universe is decreasing rather than increasing is a profoundly important truth which can NEVER be accounted for with the Newtonian paradigm of spacetime. The great Laplacian clock is NOT being wound down by the second law of thermodynamics but is winding itself UP in accordance with Onsager's principle of reciprocal relations, sometimes known as the fourth law of thermodynamics. Darwin got it but the geeks have yet to get with the programme. Physical reality is a dissipative structure but on the cosmic scale it must always be the first law of thermodynamics which reigns supreme. The universe is evolving from the simple to the complex and this is ONLY possible in the topological space of a fractal dimension. Poincare was right and Einstein was wrong but to be fair to Albert he always knew he was wrong and said so repeatedly throughout his life.

"Spacetime should NEVER be regarded as physically real"....Albert Einstein.

Obvious Leo wrote:The hubris of the physics priesthood is in a class of its own, Greta. They have managed to convince themselves that the universe is simply too complicated for us dumb schmuck biologists to understand and the fact that their models describe a universe which makes no fucking sense is to them nothing more than a trivial inconvenience. Watch and learn because the stamp collectors will be having the last laugh.

I am no biologist, just a dumb shmuck "fan" I think arrogance infects many fields of expertise to some extent. How many biologists speak about the false hard barrier drawn between geology and biology and insist on this hard line between the living and nonliving?

Good point. All the sciences are extremely vulnerable to groupthink and biology is no exception. Even nowadays Lovelock and Margulis are still regarded by a small band of troglodytes as heretics. As you should be able to see I'm essentially extending the Gaia paradigm to all of physical reality by defining it as a simple by-product of chaotic determinism. I rather like to think of this metaphysical perspective as a version of 21st century Taoism.

While I have no time for the back-to-the-Iron-Ages anti-science crowd, a serious consideration is that the angle of research has for some time been skewed towards commercial functions. A materialist physics would seem to be the physics of short term economic prosperity - where the "dead matter of the Earth" (and the equally "unimportant" plants and animals) can be ransacked wholesale with all the empathy of the predators that we were, and are - with precious little perception, let alone understanding, of the living systems they are breaking.

This was an unfortunate consequence of 20th century materialism driven by the imperatives of commerce. Our physicists were forced to abandon their scientific principles and become technocrats in the service of Mammon. This was largely due to the funding requirements of academia but the appalling system of peer review was probably the biggest hindrance to scientific progress in physics. It essentially guarantees confirmation bias at every step in the theorist's path

There are hints of retrocausality at quantum scales (apparently there were issues between Poincare and Boltzmann about this), but at larger scales Prigogine's irreversibility is all we've ever observed.

The apparent retrocausality at subatomic scales is completely illusory and entirely due to the observer applying a spatio-temporal extension to what are purely temporal phenomena. Ilya Prigogine was a highly under-rated genius and any scholar who ignores his work is completely missing the main game.

Lacewing wrote: with increasing awareness and exploration (more than human knowledge), which eventually led me to a lot of hallucinogenic use in my mid-twenties... further blowing the doors off of this reality.

I've never been happy with this construction.
As if dropping pills to alter the meticulously evolved equipment of perception and cognition would lead to a deeper, or more clear view of reality?
I've had Psilocybin; MDMA; Lysergic ACID; a range and comprehensive list of cannabis based drugs; morphine, opium, and a selection of its derivatives, a multitude of "speed" type drugs including coke and crack; alcohol, and stuff I can't remember.
Whilst I agree that taking drugs can lift you out of a complacent and overly structured way of thinking to open up your mind to new ideas, it is really only on sober and mature reflection that any use can be made of these experiences.
There is no path to greater awareness through the use of hallucinogenic drugs; but only through reflexive sobriety.
Drugs impair reason, art, music, and most activity. You really have to wait till the effects die down that you can make use of them.

Hobbes' Choice wrote:

Lacewing wrote: with increasing awareness and exploration (more than human knowledge), which eventually led me to a lot of hallucinogenic use in my mid-twenties... further blowing the doors off of this reality.

I've never been happy with this construction.
As if dropping pills to alter the meticulously evolved equipment of perception and cognition would lead to a deeper, or more clear view of reality?
I've had Psilocybin; MDMA; Lysergic ACID; a range and comprehensive list of cannabis based drugs; morphine, opium, and a selection of its derivatives, a multitude of "speed" type drugs including coke and crack; alcohol, and stuff I can't remember.
Whilst I agree that taking drugs can lift you out of a complacent and overly structured way of thinking to open up your mind to new ideas, it is really only on sober and mature reflection that any use can be made of these experiences.
There is no path to greater awareness through the use of hallucinogenic drugs; but only through reflexive sobriety.
Drugs impair reason, art, music, and most activity. You really have to wait till the effects die down that you can make use of them.

I'm totally on the same page as you on this, Hobbes. Altering reality perception gives you... *drum roll*... unreality. What a surprise, eh? There's nothing I took away from psychedelic experiences, save the knowledge of what it is like to be under the influence of said drugs. Which is useful if you ever get drugged, unintentionally.

Dalek Prime wrote: I'm totally on the same page as you on this, Hobbes. Altering reality perception gives you... *drum roll*... unreality. What a surprise, eh? There's nothing I took away from psychedelic experiences, save the knowledge of what it is like to be under the influence of said drugs. Which is useful if you ever get drugged, unintentionally.

How can you guys define everyone else's experience based on your own? The experiences I had were very spiritual in nature, where I could feel and see much more connectivity with all that is, than I would otherwise. I know a lot of people who took drugs just to blow their minds. That's not how it was for me... and that's not what I desired. Just like tribal peoples who took psychedelics to expand their understanding/awareness. I think intention has a lot to do with it (as it does with everything). I wanted to see more... and I did. For myself... and that made a huge difference for me. What is more real for my experience than that?

I don't recommend it to anyone, ever... and I didn't then. I was simply expressing now that it was part of my own history. I was full of love when I did it. I think that makes a huge difference in what you get out of it. Our mindsets/culture these days seem typically too volatile to use such powerful mind altering substances well. Anything we do with our minds is sacred... and when we don't approach it that way, we are risking a great deal. That can create some very different experiences. As with all things... there are MANY experiences to be had.

Dontaskme wrote:So you can't explain what the thing you label is... you can only point to it.

Yup, and that is pretty much all that is needed to identify a thing.

That's IT

There is no 'IT' other than the thing.

Nothing can be known about IT ...because it is not a thing. There is no thing here, except what is imagined.

What do you think is being pointed at then?

Obvious Leo wrote:... Even nowadays Lovelock and Margulis are still regarded by a small band of troglodytes as heretics. As you should be able to see I'm essentially extending the Gaia paradigm to all of physical reality by defining it as a simple by-product of chaotic determinism. I rather like to think of this metaphysical perspective as a version of 21st century Taoism. [/color]

Although a lot of new-age guff has been spouted about Lovelock's hypothesis and apparently Lovelock himself has disavowed much of what the Gaian mob have interpreted him as saying.

Lacewing wrote:

Dalek Prime wrote: I'm totally on the same page as you on this, Hobbes. Altering reality perception gives you... *drum roll*... unreality. What a surprise, eh? There's nothing I took away from psychedelic experiences, save the knowledge of what it is like to be under the influence of said drugs. Which is useful if you ever get drugged, unintentionally.

How can you guys define everyone else's experience based on your own? The experiences I had were very spiritual in nature, where I could feel and see much more connectivity with all that is, than I would otherwise. I know a lot of people who took drugs just to blow their minds. That's not how it was for me... and that's not what I desired. Just like tribal peoples who took psychedelics to expand their understanding/awareness. I think intention has a lot to do with it (as it does with everything). I wanted to see more... and I did. For myself... and that made a huge difference for me. What is more real for my experience than that?

I don't recommend it to anyone, ever... and I didn't then. I was simply expressing now that it was part of my own history. I was full of love when I did it. I think that makes a huge difference in what you get out of it. Our mindsets/culture these days seem typically too volatile to use such powerful mind altering substances well. Anything we do with our minds is sacred... and when we don't approach it that way, we are risking a great deal. That can create some very different experiences. As with all things... there are MANY experiences to be had.

Lacewing, I'm truly glad you enjoyed the experience as much or more than I did. I mean that. I still say it's you who have been fooled into believing it was anything more than a trick of the mind. There's no connection between people or things. There are only individual consciousnesses, that come and go alone.

Dalek Prime wrote:I'm totally on the same page as you on this, Hobbes. Altering reality perception gives you... *drum roll*... unreality. What a surprise, eh? There's nothing I took away from psychedelic experiences, save the knowledge of what it is like to be under the influence of said drugs. Which is useful if you ever get drugged, unintentionally.

Sam Harris would disagree: https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/ ... ng-of-life

I don't always agree with his assumptions, but I agree with this:

One thing is certain: The mind is vaster and more fluid than our ordinary, waking consciousness suggests. And it is simply impossible to communicate the profundity (or seeming profundity) of psychedelic states to those who have never experienced them. Indeed, it is even difficult to remind oneself of the power of these states once they have passed.

I should add that it's very likely that any insights about nothingness or other physics topics gleaned during peak experiences will be illusory (except perhaps for those highly literate in physics).

Only today I looked into the sky and thought, "wow, there really is nothing out there between us and other objects" . Then my rational mind kicked in and reminded me of how every iota of that "nothingness out there" is filled with chaotic energies, and there is no space between other things and the Earth but a thin network of particles that are are loosely packed enough for us to travel through.

Greta wrote:

Dalek Prime wrote:I'm totally on the same page as you on this, Hobbes. Altering reality perception gives you... *drum roll*... unreality. What a surprise, eh? There's nothing I took away from psychedelic experiences, save the knowledge of what it is like to be under the influence of said drugs. Which is useful if you ever get drugged, unintentionally.

Sam Harris would disagree: https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/ ... ng-of-life

I don't always agree with his assumptions, but I agree with this:

One thing is certain: The mind is vaster and more fluid than our ordinary, waking consciousness suggests. And it is simply impossible to communicate the profundity (or seeming profundity) of psychedelic states to those who have never experienced them. Indeed, it is even difficult to remind oneself of the power of these states once they have passed.

I should add that it's very likely that any insights about nothingness or other physics topics gleaned during peak experiences will be illusory (except perhaps for those highly literate in physics).

Only today I looked into the sky and thought, "wow, there really is nothing out there between us and other objects" . Then my rational mind kicked in and reminded me of how every iota of that "nothingness out there" is filled with chaotic energies, and there is no space between other things and the Earth but a thin network of particles that are are loosely packed enough for us to travel through.

Sam Harris can suck my dick. His theories are less provable than mine, having vastly more unprovable conjecture. Meaning to life, my ass. There is none. I'm so sick of seeing hopes and desires of individuals permeating their philosophy. Just because it's prettier, doesn't make it truer. That's how all the bullshit new age crap gets started, as well as old time religion. Through flights of fancy, because most can't handle the raw truth of nothing mattering.

Fuck, why not just admit to it; you want something to matter, or mean something in your lives. And you'll accept anything that gives you that, true or false.

I refuse to molly coddle the lot of you with your fears of meaninglessness. I've accepted it, and I'm still happily living. But I won't kid myself with pure mindless romantic crap out of fear, or a sense of ultimate worthlessness. It's all worth it while I live, on a personal level. But I know it's not, and don't give a crap. I'm here for the best short run I can have, not for some 'meaningful" long run, whatever the fuck that is.

All that matters is contained between our ears. And it's not the biological matter, but the biological processes that allow an individual conciousness to flicker into existence, and quickly flicker out again. It's all contained in that. Sure, there is substance outside ourselves. But it means bugger all if it's left unperceived by our little awareness bubbles we call consciousness. All drugs do is change your brain chemistry, and allow you to believe the things you think you've perceived during the trip are true, deep, or meaningful.

Arising_uk wrote:

Obvious Leo wrote:... Even nowadays Lovelock and Margulis are still regarded by a small band of troglodytes as heretics. As you should be able to see I'm essentially extending the Gaia paradigm to all of physical reality by defining it as a simple by-product of chaotic determinism. I rather like to think of this metaphysical perspective as a version of 21st century Taoism. [/color]

Although a lot of new-age guff has been spouted about Lovelock's hypothesis and apparently Lovelock himself has disavowed much of what the Gaian mob have interpreted him as saying.

Lovelock has disavowed almost EVERYTHING which has been spouted about the Gaian model by a considerable coterie of new-age cretins but in fact he hasn't retreated from a single point which he himself has made about the concept. Nowadays the Lovelock/Margulis model is very much regarded as the mainstream orthodoxy in evolutionary biology and in combination with the Autopoietic paradigm of Maturana and Varela it has superseded both Darwinism and neo-Darwinism as the more complete paradigm for a reality which evolves towards informational complexity. Instead of entities being modelled as evolving within a changing external environment both the entity and the environment are seen to evolve together. Specifically these models are a re-definition of the nature of causality.

Arising_uk wrote:

Dontaskme wrote:So you can't explain what the thing you label is... you can only point to it.

Yup, and that is pretty much all that is needed to identify a thing.

That's IT

There is no 'IT' other than the thing.

Nothing can be known about IT ...because it is not a thing. There is no thing here, except what is imagined.

What do you think is being pointed at then?

Arising-uk...Reality is Tacit. There is no reality except as imagined...made-up, fabricated, conceptualised, by a mind that also doesn't exist except as imagined.... what you believe to be your reality is actually unreality.

You are silence or no thing, not total nothingness, but no thing. That's it...that's all that's here, that's reality.

What are YOU without your name? YOU do not exist, only your name exists.

That's what's being pointed to. This can only be pointed to... not known directly. You can know the dream but not the dreamer, you are both. You as a dream character are the known, the known cannot know the dreamer because it is it. Just as a machine cannot know it's maker.

If you say you know...you don't ....words are known that's all. You have no idea what you are apart from the name.

The mind is the void, reality is the void, avoiding itself.....can't have something without nothing.

This is not a negative. Stop thinking, stop talking, stop ....what's left? it's that space of emptiness, the same emptiness you experience in sleep. That is the real reality, and it's here right now...it's so unbelievable peaceful... the nature all around you is this same peaceful tacit reality...it's so beautiful.

It's more beautiful than you could ever imagine, imagine the relief in knowing nothing is born therefore could never die...it's pure love.

Dalek Prime wrote: There are only individual consciousnesses, that come and go alone.

Who told you you had an individual conciousness? does a newborn baby know it's got an individual consciousness?

Now don't you think you are the one who has been fooled by your own mind here?

There is no individual. There is no conscious human being alive on this earth.

You have been fooled to think otherwise.

That which comes and goes is apparent solidity vaporising until it is invisible and then turning back into solidity. It's like your body is the ice cube in glass of water, it live there for awhile until it dissolves back into it's original formless substance.

No thing is concious...that's what consciousness is...it is not a thing.

Formless pure energy is the underpinning fundamental necessity required for appearances to form, any thing in form will appear and disappear...consciousness doesn't go anywhere....it's a synonym for electricity....or energy.

Obvious Leo wrote:The "sequence of snapshots" methodology of the block universe has proven itself time and time again as a powerful predictive tool. However it can never have any explanatory authority because of its a priori metaphysical flaw. Time is stubbornly NOT a bi-directional dimension and no amount of predictive success can ever change this. Once again physics is forced to acknowledge that at least some of its so-called "laws" are not time time invariant, most notably gravity, the second law of thermodynamics and the weak nuclear force.

Physics seems to have an interesting pair of relative blind spots - time and growth. Maybe that reflects the mathematical tools that are used? An equation neither grows nor degrades over time, so E=MC² is exactly the same as it was 50 years ago.

Meanwhile, we flesh and blood beings have both grown and degraded during that period, so there's a disconnect between the tools and the reality. It's akin to conducting autopsies in order to understand life - much essential information can be gleaned but the most critical aspects are treated as incidental and inconsequential by-products, which seems to be science's way of keeping a lid on idle speculation over the "too hard basket" items.

Obvious Leo wrote:Predicting the outcome of any chaotic process has forever been acknowledged as only possible to a finite order of probability, which should sound hauntingly familiar to any student of subatomic physics. However the predictive uncertainty is entirely due to the complexity of the causal dynamics of the entire system and has nothing whatsoever to do with the metaphysically ludicrous notion of the uncaused event, as is claimed in traditional QM. If you think carefully about this you'll see that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is precisely analogous to the 3-body problem first identified by Isaac Newton as an inevitable consequence of Galilean relativity.

Preaching to the choir here, Leo. I always figured that there must be jiggery pokery going on at smaller scales to prompt subatomic unpredictability. Smaller entities tend to be especially chaotic because they are so readily buffeted around. I doubt there is any place in the universe where some kind of force, energy or particle is not present.

Obvious Leo wrote:At any given point in time its "location" relative to one cannot possibly hold true for its location relative to the other because all three of these bodies are in constant motion.

I take it you are referring to the impossibility of absolute precision because we can predict positions in space well enough to land on a comet over half a billion kms away.

Obvious Leo wrote:The hydrogen atom is a 2 body system and subatomic particles are subject to the same "laws of motion" as are any other physical entities in the universe. It is actually relativistic gravitational motion which is determining the behaviour of the subatomic particles and all the various properties which they exhibit as a consequence of this process are emergent. In non-linear dynamic systems theory ALL emergent properties are defined as purely phenomenal and thus observer defined constructs, as both Leibniz and Kant pointed out centuries ago. So too is the immutable background space. [/color]
Yes, there is this special treatment of "spacetime" which is surely more or less the same stuff as familiar matter, only less dense. I'm pretty sure that I would bend and twist under the gravitational influence of planets and stars too, so it's no surprise that the conglomeration of various energies in space would behave that way. Einstein's realisation was that there is actually something in space that can be pushed around by gravity and other forces rather than just an unresponsive nothingness.

Obvious Leo re: scientific dissidents wrote:... there are many amongst the modern clique of theorists who have finally come to realise that no true cosmological model can ever be attained which fails to explain the existence of life and mind in our universe. This group includes Paul Davies, Frank Wilczek, Jakob Bekenstein (rip), Sean Carroll, Carlo Rovelli, Lisa Randall, and a number of others who could scarcely be categorised as bleeding edge crackpots.

Yes, there's no sense in disregarding evidence, and the evidence is that there's a whole lot more living systems out there than replicating beings of carbon and water - and they don't operate like clockwork either.

[quote="Obvious Leo]The fact that on the cosmological scale the entropy balance in our universe is decreasing rather than increasing is a profoundly important truth which can NEVER be accounted for with the Newtonian paradigm of spacetime. The great Laplacian clock is NOT being wound down by the second law of thermodynamics but is winding itself UP in accordance with Onsager's principle of reciprocal relations, sometimes known as the fourth law of thermodynamics. Darwin got it but the geeks have yet to get with the programme. Physical reality is a dissipative structure but on the cosmic scale it must always be the first law of thermodynamics which reigns supreme. The universe is evolving from the simple to the complex and this is ONLY possible in the topological space of a fractal dimension.

I don't think entropy can be so easily dismissed. The defiance of entropy by living systems is local but the overall sum is said to be dissipative. There seem to be two opposing dynamics - with geological/biological systems becoming ever more complex and ordered locally while the universal entropy increases overall.

Obvious Leo wrote:All the sciences are extremely vulnerable to groupthink and biology is no exception.

All human endeavours per se, including philosophy.

Obvious Leo wrote:As you should be able to see I'm essentially extending the Gaia paradigm to all of physical reality by defining it as a simple by-product of chaotic determinism. I rather like to think of this metaphysical perspective as a version of 21st century Taoism.

[/quote]
As you know, I've often claimed that it's more likely that the universe is alive rather than just nothingness with a few spots of rubble and rare/unique doomed pockets of life.

Lacewing wrote: If you are saying what I think you're saying... holy cow, I am right there with ya! There are times I feel so full of joy/bliss/love that I feel like I'll evaporate into thin air. As much as I want to experience another level of being... I've also been afraid for awhile, that I couldn't handle how good that would feel! I've gotten more used to the idea now though... so we'll see what happens.

The reality is Lacewing is that we /us, everyone... are the whole god damn ocean, yet we seem to live as if we are this tiny insignificant limited nobody with no power....and yet that is just not true, it is so far away from the actual truth as it could possibly get...we are essentially the weavers of our dreams. It's breath taking the opportunities that await us, if only we had the courage to stand alone against the false indoctrinated programming that has been imposed upon us by society family and friends...

The drop contains the whole ocean and works to the same principle as a hologram. We can sense this in us...and that sense of knowing you are lucid within your own dream is like trying to swallow the whole ocean in one drop.... can you imagine what impact that has on the way we have lived our lives believing we are just the drop and not the whole ocean...it's just too mindblowing for words....this realisation packs a mighty punch, is very heady and too much pleasure to comprehend...Jesus said he who sees the light will be blinded. ....so true, we're just beginning to arise from the shadows....plato's cave analogy.