Sunday School

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg:

I think that Carrie Prejean Boller and Candace Owens have a secret deal going: If one becomes the first female Pope, the other will be the first female Grand Inquisitor. And if Brigitte Macron becomes the first female Pope, they’ll both go Martin Luther-mouth-foaming Protestant.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

I think that Carrie Prejean Boller and Candace Owens have a secret deal going…

I can’t think of a reply or a witty retort.  I can only hear the words “Diet of Worms” (sic) echoing in my head and I am visualizing a sleuth of bears chanting “I’m a Bear and Bears love to embrace Catholics”  as they wander into the forest.

 

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Yes, indeed our timekeeping systems must correspond to real physical behaviour. Otherwise, they would be useless. Sundials, mechanical clocks, atomic clocks, radioactive decay all work because the universe contains stable and repeatable processes. But what they only do is to track regular physical change.

But moving from “clocks correspond to physical behavior” to “therefore time as a flowing thing must be fundamental” does not follow.

What I mean is that clocks measure regular relations between processes. They do not measure a separate entity called “time” moving past everything. A ruler’s measurements correspond to spatial structure, but a ruler doesn’t prove that “space flows”. In the same sense, clocks correspond to change but not to temporal flow.

Back to the sundial. It measures the Earth’s rotation relative to the Sun. That’s a relational process. Our mechanical timepieces measure the periodic motion of their own internal mechanisms. There is nothing inside any clock that detects a thing called time. If (when) the mechanism (or battery) runs down, the clock drifts and eventually stops. But all that has happened is that it has stopped measuring its own mechanism. The rest of the Universe continues unchanged. So, the clock is clearly not measuring an external flowing substance. At most it is comparing its own regular change to other changes.

As for atomic clocks, they only measure stable quantum transitions which is just repeatable physical behavior.  Radioactive decay measure probabilistic state changes in matter. No flowing time required, only ordered physical processes.

Clocks do not measure time. They measure themselves and we interpret the results. Timekeeping is the comparison of rhythms, not the detection of time.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Reg, if aliens show up at your door and are to us what we are to eukaryotes and KNOW the nature of the universe what odds would you require before you laid down your money on the block universe?

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg:

I can’t think of a reply or a witty retort. I can only hear the words “Diet of Worms” (sic) echoing in my head and I am visualizing a sleuth of bears chanting “I’m a Bear and Bears love to embrace Catholics” as they wander into the forest.

The “Diet of Worms” comes after the bears embrace and engorge on the frightened Catholics they meet, answering both of the famous questions of sleuths: “Does a bear shit in the woods?” And “Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

One would hope Carrie and Candace have more sense than to join The Teddy Bears’ Picnic. They’re too entertaining as Jesters in the New Dark Ages!

• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 2 days ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spelling

[jakelafortParticipant]

That is a nice voice from 1932.

95 theses. 99 luftballoons. 9 9 9 Wally George. 9’s are wild. Crazy 8s.

I would put my money on no reality. Not the standard model. Not the block. Not parallel. Not string. Not multiverse. Not steady state. Not oscillating.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

If they called in the middle of the night I would ask them, “What time do you call this??”  They would probably reply “Relative to what frame?”

Then, after a few introductory nanu nanu’s, I would realize that their framework does not privilege clock labels as they have evolved to think purely in relational or structural terms. I would think to myself that they understand relativity better than most humans do. Then I would rehearse the words “Klaatu barada nikto” in my head to make sure I got the pronunciation correct…just in case I thought I was about to shazbot myself.

But do you keep records of events? I would ask. If they answer something like,  Yes, of course we do because coordination between subsystems requires reference processes. We don’t exist just on one little planet, so time zones are of no practical use to us.  We live on planets across several galaxies so asking for a local coordination labeling system in a universe that doesn’t provide one intrinsically would get us nowhere.  You humans like to travel along straight map lines because your 3D brains like to think in 2D. Our 5D brains “see” the 4D nature of Spacetime so we traveled along a geodesic spacetime path. In fact it took us no time at all to get here!!

Money in the bank….!!

• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 2 days ago by  Reg the Fronkey Farmer.
• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 2 days ago by  Reg the Fronkey Farmer.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

FYI – This is not debate in the usual sense. I am stress-testing a model of reality in public. I think it has a lot of merit. It is not intuitive because it goes against our evolved sense of time flow. But this is only useful on Earth, locally. Relativity strongly suggests a 4D spacetime structure that looks block-like. I’m trying to break it. If it survives, that tells me something. I am not claiming that “the block universe must be true.” If I leave on the alien ship with Gork and the gang,  Wednesday’s will never feel the same again.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Jake:

Reg, if aliens show up at your door and are to us what we are to eukaryotes and KNOW the nature of the universe what odds would you require before you laid down your money on the block universe?

Pascal’s Wager doesn’t answer any question, otherwise Vegas would be the data capital of the world.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Janke:

I would put my money on no reality. Not the standard model. Not the block. Not parallel. Not string. Not multiverse. Not steady state. Not oscillating.

Reality of course doesn’t care where you put your money, especially the quadrants of timespace labeled “Federal Reserve 1913”, “Savings & Loan 1987”, “Housing Market 2007” or “Congress and The White House any given 24/7/365.”

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg:

Our 5D brains “see” the 4D nature of Spacetime so we traveled along a geodesic spacetime path. In fact it took us no time at all to get here!!

Money in the bank….!!

So, “Let the Sun Shine In” on what this 5th Dimension is. The fruits of the Parsimony Tree are falling off here.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

My point is not that the human experience of time is wrong. The experience is real, but it may be an interface rather than a fundamental feature of reality. Our brains are optimized for local 3D survival, not for grasping global spacetime structure.

Because everyone shares the sensation of temporal flow, we naturally assume it must be objective. But shared perception does not automatically reveal underlying structure. History shows that common intuition can still misrepresent reality.

Relativity, repeatedly confirmed for over a century, describes a 4D spacetime structure without a universal moving present. Human timekeeping systems like sundials, watches, atomic clocks, are just coordination tools built from regular physical processes. They help us organize experience but do not prove that time itself flows.

So, the claim isn’t that daily life is better explained by non-fundamental time. Daily life works perfectly well either way. The question is which framework better fits our best physical theories with fewer assumptions.

In that sense, we don’t need hypothetical aliens to tell us how reality works. Our own physics already points toward a spacetime picture that is less intuitive than our evolved perspective. It is a reality that looks less like moving moments and more like structure. We live inside our cave of local experience, and the shadows are our sense of temporal passage and they are useful, but that is not the whole story.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Reg, funny stuff. I laughed. Not LOL.

Lol is another mindless utterance. What sort of laugh is silent?

Here is another time study video.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Janke?

Ok.

Enco, surely you must acknowledge how the metaphor of the cave cannot possibly capture the depth of ignorance and our wiring to understand it all?

My hypothetical is not Pascal’s stupidity.

[jakelafortParticipant]

This guy has it right. None of the obsession over Jews has any relation to their putative evil doings. That is why i prefer Nazis. They aint hiding their objectives or rationalizing them in a way that justifies their hatred or gives cover to their actions. Racial purity and all that German mythology is discredited.

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