what is outside the universe

[paradox]

have people heard of the concept in quantum physics of vacuum fluctuations? i think this is relevant to this discussion..

thunder yeah i remember you talking about similar stuff

woof i think it's like bungee jumping.. quite safe unless one has a weak spine hehe

a couple of links:

newscientist: Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations

newscientist quantum world

[paradox]

not that i haven't enjoyed reading the different ways everyone has been saying it, but as i've said in the past, the notion that if you alter the scale enough then you more or less return where you started (which was portrayed at the end of the movie "men in black" when the camera zooms out beyond galaxies and shit until you see a snail-man playing marbles) is just a little bit fucken weak! i know i'm being rude but i wish that if you all are going to the effort to describe speculations on the grandiose structures of reality then make it more worthwhile, or i feel like i'm the only person here that has taken good acid.

 

i just personally think for the most part the whole discussion is pretty stupid.. as far as i'm concerned, making grandiose speculations makes as much sense as expecting our understanding of physics to adequately answer questions such as this..

would it be ridiculous to speculate that perhaps the laws of physics are to some degree determined by a relationship between 'the universe' & human consciousness limited by it's operation in only 4 dimensions? the objects of our knowledge are entirely relative to the instrument that has created the structures of meaning at the basis of that knowledge ie our brain & nervous system..

just because for the most part we're unable to comprehend it, is it ridiculous to speculate that the universe in itself is not limited by the 4 dimensional prism through which we aprehend it but is in fact much more complex than we even can suppose?

i think we just have to be a whole lot more humble.. it's only fear of our ultimate immersion in (infinite?) unknowableness that stops us confronting the simple facts of the profound weirdness of whats 'actually' going on.. it's only fear of 'madness' that defines madness as mad..

my only assertion would be that any assertion regarding ultimate questions is by it's very definition meaningless except as intellectual entertainment... we should of course attempt to master the realms of what we are capable of perceiving & that has to be done step by step from the ground up, which i think is what science is... but i think it's profoundly juvinile to assume it repesents anything beyond the constraints of our own operating system & is entirely relative to it

[Seldom]

my only assertion would be that any assertion regarding ultimate questions is by it's very definition meaningless except as intellectual entertainment

really? i normally dig the thought that goes into your posts man but come oon. that's a pin in the balloon if ever i've heard one!

in what sense are you using the word meaningless? linguistically i sort of agree, in terms of these assertions using signs that lack a substantial referent, maybe, but if we distinguish between semantic and overall, i definitely disagree. "the square circle spoke silently by ringing ephedra bushes through the television". that's a grammatically correct yet completely false statement. would you put assertions about ultimate questions on the same level? what about the distinction between 'this sentence has no meaning' and 'my life has no meaning'? is it meaningless in the second sense?

[paradox]

all my point is, & it's an extremely obvious one really.. is that we are severely limited in our intellectual ability to 'understand' the universe as a whole.. & IMO an important step we have to take is a profound recognition & acceptance of the paradox of attempting to understand what could for all we know be an infinite-dimensional universe through the window of 4 dimensions in an ape brain..

if we're not even capable of percieving the vast majority of whats going on inside & around us on levels that are so profoundly beyond what we could even begin to imagine.. how can we construct models of whats truly going on based on the profound limitations of our perception & expect those models to explain anything about the ultimate structure/function/whatever of the universe as a whole, beyond our own profound limitations? except relative to previous models we have costructed to explain things to ourselves based on the original fact that we are only able to percieve so much & further more the language we have to communicate our perceptions is an whole other order of limitation again..

all i am saying is our knowledge about anything is entirely relative to ourselves & outside of our own needs & desires & collective & individual realities our 'knowledge' is ultimately meaningless.. & by ultimately i mean in regards to the possibly infinte vastness that lies within & beyond our own capabilities to percieve..

[Seldom]

all my point is, & it's an extremely obvious one really.. is that we are severely limited in our intellectual ability to 'understand' the universe as a whole.. & IMO an important step we have to take is a profound recognition & acceptance of the paradox of attempting to understand what could for all we know be an infinite-dimensional universe through the window of 4 dimensions in an ape brain

 

my point is that we are in the world's/galaxy's/etc most privileged position in our intellectual ability to understand the universe

with the exception of religions, i don't know of a lot of people claiming they do understand the whole universe. Who do you expect to be making this 'profound recognition and acceptance'? how do you think people involved in constructing new knowledge frame the nature of the knowledge they're creating? no one assumes a 1:1 correspondence between current ways of thinking about the universe and the way things 'really are'. hypotheses are never proved to be true, it's a core feature of scientific method.

reminds me of the myth of Sisyphus

"The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need for knowledge and the unreasonable silence of the world."

imo it's holding too fast to a defeated sense of what knowledge is.

Edited October 23, 2011 by bulls on parade

[ThunderIdeal]

:D

i guess that what you just said bulls, is not as widely recognised as it could be.

some people see gaps in a picture and imagine it is much like the rest, others will fantasise all kinds of freaky stuff, especially if they're trippers.

[paradox]

my point is that we are in the world's/galaxy's/etc most privileged position in our intellectual ability to understand the universe

with the exception of religions, i don't know of a lot of people claiming they do understand the whole universe. Who do you expect to be making this 'profound recognition and acceptance'? how do you think people involved in constructing new knowledge frame the nature of the knowledge they're creating? no one assumes a 1:1 correspondence between current ways of thinking about the universe and the way things 'really are'. hypotheses are never proved to be true, it's a core feature of scientific method.

 

yes & i think we are capable of a whole lot more also..

i'm not saying that many people claim to understand the whole universe, of course that would be absurd.. which i guess is why many people think that way about organized religeon.. i understand the core feature of scientific method.. i'm not in any way dissing science or assuming it to be something it's not.. i fucking love science, i just think in certain areas theres a limit to where the objective observer, grass roots method can be useful & those limits are blatantly apparent when you get into questions like Whats Outside the Universe.. theres some fucking complex & bazaar shit going on involving the relationship between our consciousness & matter/what we call the universe.. science is beginning to tell us that it's a lot weirder than we could have ever imagined.. it's my opinion that it's important to get a grip on the fact that things are weird to some degree & be humble so we can fearlessly come to terms with our own bazaar nature as we learn more..

i think we should all be making this recognition & acceptance.. along with deep respect for the capabilties of our nervous system.. humble our ego's in the face of the abyss so we don't wet our pants & lose the plot when we're confronted with some of the more twisted aspects of ourselves..

i just think it's intelligent to see our knowledge for what it is..

[Seldom]

it is a good point, the method of allowing previous knowledge to inform current understanding is really at most half of what drives progression of ideas, good thinking always pays due to the depth of what we don't know

[paradox]

i'm watching this just now

BBC: How long is a piece of string?

[Seldom]

just thinking more, i can see a few beautiful expositions of this idea in religious texts for example the book of Job. God's will in the present for the Christians is, as with your ideas on the ultimate meaning, completely incomprehensible. God's will can only supposedly be seen retrospectively. throughout his successive traumas there are three men that try alleviate his suffering by endowing it with meaning, unjust speculation etc. even his wife urges him to blame God, but Job insists on maintaining the meaninglessness of his predicament, all attributions of meaning to his suffering are rejected as an unjust falsification, in order to maintain his Christian identity he affirms it in faith as meaningless, the lesson i spose being that incomprehensibility is a core feature of imminent, real time experience

another formulation of the idea is in the Tao Te Ching where it says (roughly) cultivate an affinity with the light (understanding) but maintain fidelity to the dark (incomprehensibility)

[Gunter]

have people heard of the concept in quantum physics of vacuum fluctuations? i think this is relevant to this discussion..

 

quantum vaccum fluctuations are kind of a joke, they is less testable than god and twice as theoretical.

would it be ridiculous to speculate that perhaps the laws of physics are to some degree determined by a relationship between 'the universe' & human consciousness limited by it's operation in only 4 dimensions?

not only ridiculous, but absurdly vain

Edited October 23, 2011 by Gunter

[paradox]

of course vacuum fluctuations are only theoretical, they're a way of making sense out of a phenomenon that makes no sense in regard to our conventional understanding of physics, which is basically my entire point.. if you don't like vacuum fluctuations then look into the uncertainty principle, not being able to measure such things is basically an inherent property.. or just look into quantum mechanics in general dude.. it's a frontier science yes but it's not a joke... it certainly tends to make a joke of our understanding of classical physics at times though..

fair enough, bringing physics into the second statement you quoted makes it silly, but all i'm trying to do is point out the inherent flaws in our operating systems.. i think it's the opposite of vain really, i'm attempting to admit how dumb i am! it is however very absurd! the universe as you experience it is a holographic projection produced from decoded, catagorized & interpreted sense data in your nervous system.. i don't think it's particularly far out to assume that a 'world' ie your experience of the universe, which is entirely constructed out of mind (interpreted data) would be inherently limited by the structures of the instrument that is producing it...

our brains/minds evolved within the very tight restarints of our evolutionary niche as apes.. it seems obvious we would be immensly biased in regard to the specific ways we interpret sense data, as the process that shaped our evolution specifically favoured structuring that data in a way that would ensure the survival of an ape..

i think we're selling ourselves incredibly short if we take for granted what we think we know.. to do that would certainly be absurdly vain

[paradox]

another formulation of the idea is in the Tao Te Ching where it says (roughly) cultivate an affinity with the light (understanding) but maintain fidelity to the dark (incomprehensibility)

 

this also reminds me a bit of ralph abraham's (mathematician) ideas about the fractal relationship of chaos & order in the mind.. he's applying a fractal model to the mind & i think he's basically saying that in a healthy mind there exists a cohesive fractal relationship between chaos & order & therefore one should strive to balance the stimulus to the mind between these two extremes.. & often imbalance in the mind of individuals in the modern world is actually due to a huge over abundance of order.. he goes on to say that when referring to imbalance in the mind often it's more appropriate to say that someone is suffering from a dischaos rather than a disorder.. i'm not smart enough to explain the subtleties so heres a basic rundowm of the idea taken from his site, is interesting stuff i think:

DISCHAOS: DYNAMICAL MODELS

The fractal concept introduced into anthropology by Haraway and subsequent works by Wagner, McWhinney, and Strathern are epitomized by the idea of the sandy beach. We begin the description of our model by (1) recalling this static concept, then (2) we will extend it to the dynamical model of Lewin, Thom, and Zeeman as the fractal seraratrix or basin boundary, and finally (3) we will use the model to introduce the concept of the dischaotic personality.

3.1 The Sandy Beach

In Mandelbrot's classic text, the second chapter is titled: 'How long is the coast of Britain?' We will describe the sandy beach in the two-dimensional con text of a map. Thus, the ocean and the land are mostly two- dimensional. Before fractal geometry, the map showed the boundary between the ocean and the land as a smooth curve: a one-dimensional coast. But now, thanks to Mandelbrot (he gives credit to Richardson), we may zoom in on the coast, and see that it has very small islands, even pebbles, in a densely packed structure. Zooming in again, we see grains of sand on the beach, and in the ocean close to the beach. All this is the coast: it has a fractal dimension. Land penetrates into the ocean in a frothy structure of sand, ocean penetrates into the land in a frothy structure of water in the wet sand. Not only is the coast a fractal, with a dimension more than one but less than two, but it is a fractal region: the coastal zone. The ocean and land are not divided by the coast in a binary fashion: they interpenetrate in a fractal geometry. The fractals of chaos theory (attractors, separatrices, and bifurcations) are all of the sandy beach variety.

3.2 Fractal Seraratrices

We now make a jump to the dynamical model of Lewin, who imagined the life space or psychological field of a person as the state space of a (continuous) dynamical system. The observable behaviors in this model are the attractors, and the significant regions of life space, then, are the basins of attractions of these attractors. Further, the separatrices (the boundaries of these basins) are crucial to the Lewinian view of psychology [vanilla ]. In many important examples, these separatrices are fractal [ueda road to chaos ], [yorke wada ]. This means that the sandy beach concept applies to the boundary between two different behavioral regions. This will be our basic model in this paper. We should point out, however, that the improvement of the Lewinian model due to Thom and Zeeman is more complex: the attractor-basin portrait in the state space (life space of Lewin) is replaced by the response diagram, in the product of the state space and the control space of a dynamical scheme (morphogenetic field of Thom.)

3.3 The Dischaotic Personality

We now assume a Lewinian dynamical model for the 'self' or life space of an individual. Different aspects of the personality, depending critically on the individual, are represented in this model by groups of basins of attraction. These may be slowly changing in time, under the effects of learning, adaptation, stimuli, and so on. Now that chaos theory and fractal geometry have emerged, we expect that fractal boundaries of these psychological regions are the rule, rather than the exception. Following the lead of chaos theoretic models in medical physiology, we may expect that chaotic attractors and fractal separatrices are important for health. Specifi cally, we may suggest that fat fractal separatrices in the psyche have an integrating effect. For under the effect of random or chaotic stimuli, the trajectory of the Lewinian model jumps about in small discontinuities, landing in different basins because of the fractal boundaries. This has the effect of integrating the different behaviors of the different attractors into a strongly associated or mixed personality. On the other hand, when the boundaries have become (perhaps in a pathological situation) too ordered (or dischaotic) or if the fractal dimension is too small, there would be a ten dency to manifest one attractor for some time, until an exceptional stimulus pushes the trajectory over the edge into the basin of another aspect of the self, and there is a dramatic change in behavior. Posing dischaos/chaos as a binary dichotomy instead of order/disorder, we may call this situation personality dischaos, rather than the more patriarchal personality disorder.

[mysubtleascention]

George Kavassilas talking about this Universe

Edited November 19, 2011 by mysubtleascention

[ThunderIdeal]

i REALLY liked that.

do you have any more?

edit: nevermind

http://georgekavassilas.org/log/interviews/

i like what he's got to say.

Edited November 20, 2011 by ThunderIdeal

[mysubtleascention]

more –

even there

.. okay now

do I really not care !

Edited January 7, 2013 by mysubtleascention

[Dolos]

George Kavassilas talking about this Universe

 

For some reason that all makes sense to me, or at least it makes sense in my heart..21st of March 2013 hey? Not that long to see if he is correct.

Thankyou for sharing

[devance]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentachoron#

n geometry, the 5-cell is a four-dimensional object bounded by 5 tetrahedral cells. It is also known as the pentachoron, pentatope, or hyperpyramid. It is a 4-simplex, the simplest possible convex regular 4-polytope (four-dimensional analogue of a polyhedron), and is analogous to the tetrahedron in three dimensions and the triangle in two dimensions.

The regular 5-cell is bounded by regular tetrahedra, and is one of the six regular convex polychora, represented by Schläfli symbol {3,3,3}.

[ThunderIdeal]

that wiki illustrates how much more accessible polytopes are becoming!

[FancyPants]

http://en.wikipedia....ki/Pentachoron#

n geometry, the 5-cell is a four-dimensional object bounded by 5 tetrahedral cells. It is also known as the pentachoron, pentatope, or hyperpyramid. It is a 4-simplex, the simplest possible convex regular 4-polytope (four-dimensional analogue of a polyhedron), and is analogous to the tetrahedron in three dimensions and the triangle in two dimensions.

The regular 5-cell is bounded by regular tetrahedra, and is one of the six regular convex polychora, represented by Schläfli symbol {3,3,3}.

 

That is blowing my mind

[Xenodimensional]

Froth.... Look at superclusters for example... the universe on a very large scale (and all kinds of smaller scales) resembles a filamenty, frothing, foamy mass (the Cosmic Web). I postulate that our universe (and all its frothy superclusters) are contained in the cell of a larger bubble i.e. part of an even bigger foam and that universes spawn as per the fractal inflationary theory...

Here's some Polytopes I generated:

A few more here

The question then becomes what is outside the foam/bubbles? I believe 'nothing' cannot possibly be.... but if it can exist, perhaps it is causing a vacuum which our universe is expanding into?

Cosmic Web... Mycelium.... same shiz, different size...

Edited December 3, 2011 by Xenodimensional

[ThunderIdeal]

nice thoughts xeno.

what is outside of a dream?

[chilli]

Been watching this guy talk about cosmology and was reminded of this thread at about 20:00:

 

"Nothing isn't nothing anymore!"

;)

[mysubtleascention]

Nassim Haramein's work..

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1JDMToJDe0

Edited February 16, 2012 by mysubtleascention

[dworx]

abandoned

Edited April 4, 2013 by dworx