[extropy-chat] something rather than nothing

A B austriaaugust at yahoo.com
Fri Mar 23 20:19:48 UTC 2007


Hi Mike,

Mike writes:

"this definition causes a contradiction - any amount
> of the known about
> a thing makes it cease to be no-thing."

Yeah, you're right. I did a crappy job with that. If
you think of nothingness as being undefined or having
an infinitely long definition (which is also what I
believe), then you're right, you could gain new
knowledge by exploring the nothingness idea, without
ever corralling a meaningful definition of
nothingness; except to know that consciousness and
nothingness are not identical. "I think, therefore I
am." or something like that. :-)

I wonder if it can be proven theoretically that our
Universe didn't start at "the very beginning" by
showing that our Universe isn't infinite. I'm just
spit-balling ideas here without any evidence, but,
what the hell? It's fun. 

If a Universe was predetermined to have a positively
infinite lifespan, then an observer from any
"time-location" should be able to look backwards and
see an infinitely long history of their own Universe,
back to the "beginning". If we take positive infinity
(which would represent the total lifespan of this
hypothetical Universe) and divide it by any finite
number (which would represent a randomly selected
"time-location" for an observer) the quotient is still
infinity which would correspond with the apparent
"age" of the Universe from this observer's
perspective. Eg.

Infinite Lifespan / 2 = Infinite apparent age 

(where 2 represents an observer who exists halfway
into the lifespan of this hypothetical Universe)(But
any finite positive integer could be used as a
divisor).

So, I wonder if the fact that our Universe appears to
be only 15 Billion years old, can be used to prove
that our Universe will never become infinitely old,
either because it will eventually come to an end in a
Crunch, or because the birth of our Universe 15
Billion years ago did not represent the actual "very
beginning", and wasn't the first origin of
"something". This second alternative is so much more
comforting in my opinion. :-) And I think that if we
can succeed with a friendly super-intelligence we
could prevent a Big Crunch from happening that
otherwise might happen. For example, we could
eventually get rid of surplus gravity sources by
building our own black holes through compiling matter
and then allowing the mass to slowly be converted into
harmless Hawking Radiation. Or, just by creating a
helluva lot of fusion reactions.

Best Wishes,

Jeffrey Herrlich     


--- Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 3/19/07, A B <austriaaugust at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > set of fundamental physical laws. But I would
> maybe
> > define "something" as that which is partially
> known,
> > and nothing as that which is partially unknown.
> 
> this definition causes a contradiction - any amount
> of the known about
> a thing makes it cease to be no-thing.
> 
> > it offers insights into our own Universe. Eg. If
> > nothingness is also devoid of time, then why is
> our
> > Universe only 15 billion years old (as the
> empirical
> > evidence suggests)? IOW, if nothingness is devoid
> of a
> > chronology, or a time "flow", then why *isn't* our
> > Universe either infinitely old (or nearly so)?
> With
> 
> it is not devoid of time - just that time is an
> arbitrary dimension
> out of which something measurable becomes
> observable.  There is also
> an interpretation that this universe is only a
> moment, but that it
> instantiates with a memory we may interpret as 15
> billion years.
> Perhaps the universe appears to be this old because
> that's how long it
> takes for stateful information to propogate through
> the medium that
> consciousness inhabits.  Once every action/reaction
> is resolved, the
> event ceases to exist? (inclusive of recursive
> reaction to reaction,
> etc.  possibly the stack is still creating new
> instances without have
> reached the base condition)
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> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
> 



 
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