Simon Paynton

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Do you see “now” as a real moving present sweeping along the line or a a point of access within a fixed structure.

I understand it to mean “now” is local to you. But that doesn’t mean it moves. It just means your current brain state only has access to one region of your worldline. “Now” is real as perspective b…

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TheEncogitationer wrote:
In all fairness, any prediction could be considered true if the prognosticator talks nebulously enough, moves the goalposts, and, above all, talks a lot. Astrologers, psychics, and self-proclaimed “prophets” do it all the time.

They could, and they do, but this was different.  She went around telling people their futu…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
“Now” is not a universal property spread across space. The universe doesn’t care where the time zone line is drawn. Only humans do. Our segmentation of our experience of time flow is just a convention. The feeling that clock time reflects a moving reality is mistaken.

OK, true, the clock isn’t evidence of anyth…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
So yes, we do experience a “present” but not “now”. Experience is a perspective from one region of spacetime, not evidence that reality contains a moving “now”. A camera records one frame at a time, but the film does not move through the camera — the whole reel exists.

I don’t know what it proves.  I’m not saying it…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
In spacetime, an object is not a 3D thing that moves. It is a 4D curve or a “worldline”. From my birth to my death, I am not “an entity” or dot moving through time. I am an extended 4D structure. Think of a thread woven though spacetime. (Or as I called myself previously – I am an ontic worm).

Yes, but you only expe…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Modern physics does not operate with any variable for time = flow. No equation contains a term to describe ‘time is moving’. Relativity explicitly forbids universal flow as different observers in different locations disagree on temporal ordering.

Is this not “argument from ignorance”?  We can’t explain it, ther…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
I needed to stop confusing time passing with time as a coordinate 🙂

Yes, but the coordinate keeps changing as time passes.  Or, as you pass time.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Do we cooperate or compete to survive?

It’s interesting to think about the conditions where it’s optimal for the individual to cooperate, or to compete.  As a species, it’s necessary to cooperate to survive.  As individuals, it’s sometimes optimal to cheat.

jakelafort wrote:
Don’t knock sexual repression. It is great for creating teenage and early twenties suicide bombers.

It’s worst in highly patriarchal countries, where the rich men hoover up all the wives, and the poorest men are left with no-one to marry.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
States with higher percentages of evangelical Protestants, theists, and biblical literalists tend to have higher overall frequencies of Google searches for the term “porn.”

Similar work connecting religiosity and web searches found a link between state-level religiosity and searches for explicit content like “po…

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Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Why Ideology, not Faith, drives the Culture War.

This article is super-interesting.  I know you’ve got to be clever to do all that statistics stuff.  Evangelicals are conservative and have conservative (i.e., highly patriarchal) views.  Non-religious are mainly liberal and have liberal views.  That makes a lot of sen…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
ask him to justify his framing of almost every issue through the narcisstic lens of Trump. How is it that the president of the USA subordinates the interests of the people he is representing as the ultimate public servant to his own interests?

If you did that, he would ruin you, and possibly have you shot, lol.  Is anyone still…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
My take (yours may differ) on the cause of the fracture was replacing (or displacing) the concept of universal individual rights in favor of group-identity moral ranking. A lot of modern progressiveness has moved away from treating everyone as equal individuals and toward treating people primarily as members of…

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jakelafort wrote:
I thought as mass approaches speed of light it becomes infinite?

I think that mass becomes infinite as it approaches the speed of light through space, not time.

jakelafort wrote:
And if big bang is a beginning at what point does blocking become the nature of the thing as a whole?

It’s a shape.  I can’t visualise something in 4D, but I presume we have length, breadth, height, and time.  Eventually, if there’s heat death, then events stop happening and time runs out.

Inside the shape, local events exist a…[Read more]