If a Maxwell’s demon was ever proven practical it would basically disprove the second law of thermodynamics.
Wait, why? What does knowing a perfect state of system has to do with the law of thermodynamics?
Maxwell’s demon knowing in advance the exact state of the system isn’t really practical as a solution. Sure you can concoct such a situation, but that isn’t useful.
Consciousness being an emergent property of the universe instead of the universe being an emergent property of consciousness.
Thank you for this. I was just thinking about it and how it implies consciousness is shared or linked in some way.
We are all the same entity, just different instances, existing inside of the greater consciousness that is the universe. We have performed every great and evil act to ourselves, as we are all the same entity.
I can’t say we are the same. Not definitively. Only similar.
I dont mean that we are the same as in each human is exactly like one another.
I mean we are the same as in there is no “we”, “we” is an illusion. There is only one of us, experiencing existence through the lens of each living creature simultaneously. “We” are the universe itself. The humans, the animals, all of the matter and energy are just perturbations in our collective fabric. The current body in which you are experiencing life is just one of many appendiges.
You are yourself and you are your parents. You are the primordial cavemen. You are hitler, and you are ghandi.
All of these experiences of each life feed back into the greater consciousness.
In a way, but we are also different and our own experiences/thoughts belong to only us. As far as we know.
I have a story I want to tell where in our dreams we reconnect with the “tree of life” and this is our opportunity to split from combined consciousness or recombine with the singularity.
In this space we are searching and experiencing different realities, lifetimes, or similar lifetimes where only a single choice is made different, where time isnt exactly 1:1 and when we wake there are remnants of our experiences in these states. It will explain how death isn’t a inevibiltiy but in this search we find where we think we want to be. It’s just that it’s a vast sea and the searching never truly ends.
Makes me think about how many might chose to be a cell or more complex life.
This is a good answer. Bernardo Kastrup argues this; check out his very eloquently titled book Why Materialism is Baloney.
Kastrup is entirely unconvincing because he pretends the only two schools of philosophy in the whole universe are his specific idealism and metaphysical realism which he falsely calls the latter “materialism.” He thus never feels the need to ever address anything outside of a critique of a single Laymen understanding of materialism which is more popular in western countries than eastern countries, ignoring the actual wealth of philosophical literature.
Anyone who actually reads books on philosophy would inevitably find Kastrup to be incredibly unconvincing as he, by focusing primarily on a single school, never justifies many of his premises. He begins from the very beginning talking about “conscious experience” and whatnot when, if you’re not a metaphysical realist, that is what you are supposed to be arguing in the first place. Unless you’re already a dualist or metaphysical realist, if you are pretty much any other philosophical school like contextual realist, dialectical materialist, empiriomonist, etc, you probably already view reality as inherently observable, and thus perception is just reality from a particular point-of-view. It then becomes invalid to add qualifiers to it like “conscious experience” or “subjective experience” as reality itself cannot had qualifiers.
I mean, the whole notion of “subjective experience” goes back to Nagel who was a metaphysical realist through-and-through and wrote a whole paper defending that notion, “What is it like to be a Bat?”, and this is what Kastrup assumes his audience already agrees with from the get-go. He never addresses any of the criticisms of metaphysical realism but pretends like they don’t exist and he is the unique sole critic of it and constantly calls metaphysical realism “materialism” as if they’re the same philosophy at all. He then builds all of his arguments off of this premise.
That the universe is infinite. It’s unknown if it is but commonly called infinite. It could, however, be finite in some way, such as be wrapping back around on itself out past observable space.
What would cause it to do that? Only thing I can think of is gravity, no? That would imply there’s something in the middle that keeps everything from straying too far?
Or do you simply mean that our perception of space is limited and we simply can’t perceive it properly and thus we’d go in one direction and end up back where we started? But if that’s the case, it means we’ve also misunderstood light? Doesn’t it go infinitely? So shouldn’t there be a light source that reaches us from different directions?
Thinking of it as quantum first.
Before the 20th century, there was a preference for the idea that things were continuous.
Then there was experimental evidence that things were quantized when interacted with, and we ended up with wave particle duality. The pendulum swung in that direction and is still going.
This came with a ton of weird behaviors that didn’t make philosophical sense - things like Einstein saying “well if no one is looking at the moon does it not exist?”
So they decided fuck the philosophy and told the new generation to just shut up and calculate.
Now we have two incompatible frameworks. At cosmic scales, the best model (general relatively) is based on continuous behavior. And at small scales the framework is “continuous until interacted with when it becomes discrete.”
But had they kept the ‘why’ in mind, as time went on things like the moon not existing when you don’t look at it or the incompatibility of those two models would have made a lot more sense.
It’s impossible to simulate the interactions of free agents with a continuous universe. It would take an uncountably infinite amount of information to keep track.
So at the very point that our universe would be impossible to simulate, it suddenly switches from behaving in an impossible to simulate way to behaving in a way with finite discrete state changes.
Even more eyebrow raising, if you erase the information about the interaction, it switches back to continuous as if memory optimized/garbage collected with orphaned references cleaned up (the quantum eraser variation of Young’s double slit experiment).
The latching on to the quantum experimental results and ditching the ‘why’ in favor of “shut up and calculate” has created an entire generation of physicists chasing the ghost of a unified theory of gravity while never really entertaining the idea that maybe the quantum experimental results are the side effects of emulating a continuous universe.
Parallel reality could be the next zodiac sign. That, or the n-body problem could become a FUD, with scientists proving that all it required was watching separated oil bubbles in lava lamp or something, I don’t know.
When we finally figure out and understand, in a real world mechanical sort of way, quantum mechanics, all bets will be off.
It’ll open up a new perspective on the Universe (dare I say Metaverse?), and where we fit in with everything.
Gravity is an unproven hypothesis.
Something simple like if we just ignored Gravity we could move faster than light.
Or time maybe?
That evolution is purely randomness + fitness landscape rather than that DNA guides the process at least somewhat. Don’t burn me alive guys
I would expect randomness to play a larger roll than fitness.
In the short term (single digit generations) that’s probably true, but I don’t see how it could be on longer scales. If the random mutations decrease fitness, they won’t be passed on at some point, since there is less reproduction. If they increase fitness, they will be passed on to more individuals.
Time (capital T) is vastly different than time (lowercase t).
