[ExI] Dark Energy and Causal Cells

[Stuart LaForge]

Bill W wrote:

>> Just an opportunity to appeal to those who prefer
>> dogma to discovery. Feel free to share the good news.

> You have just described a big difference between conservatives and
> liberals.  Conservatives are motivated mainly by fear, and what is the
> best cure for that?  Certainty.  Which dogma gives. More religious, more
> irrational.

I am against dogma in general. But if dogma fills an emotional need for
security, it should be as rational a dogma as possible.

Two satellites designed to map our cosmic microwave background, WMAP and
Planck have both reported that there is a greater than 50% chance that the
universe is either flat or open. Both of those geometries are infinite.

Therefore, as bets go, betting that the universe is infinite is at least a
rational one. Perhaps one could make a case it would also make a more
rational dogma than most.

>> When experience fails, as it often does when environmental changes are
>> sudden and unexpected, hopeful foolishness is not a bad fallback option.
>> From an evolutionary perspective that is.
> --
> It makes me wonder how depression [becomes] so entrenched in many people,
> because what they tend to do in a crisis [is] sit and worry and feel bad.
> There are actually some psych studies showing that unwarranted optimism
> can be a very good strategy.  A false confidence is better than no
> confidence, which breeds inactivity.  Fools, as you say.----

There is really no such thing as unwarranted optimism. There is just our
attitude toward change. To embrace change as being just as likely to be
better as worse than the same old shit is not false confidence. It is
simply confidence.

> causal cells - what? (I googled it and got nothing). If you have followed
> my posts over the few years I've been around,and sometimes, notably, the
> absence of them, you realize, with a wry smile, that you have left me
> entirely in the dust with your explanation of multiple mes.

You can't find causal cells on Google because they are a neologism I
coined here on the list a few months ago. The concept itself has been
steadily evolving as I research it. As far as a rigorous mathematical
definition goes, I have yet to figure that out.

In General Relativity, they seem to be isomorphic with the Schwarzschild
metric with the allowance that two or more such metrics can be nested
inside one another yet remain causally independent except with regard to
the reversal of the direction of the arrow of time, the polarity of the
event horizon, and the vacuum energy of the interior.

So in short causal cells are black holes and their time reversals, also
known as white holes, possibly inside other larger black/white holes.

Those black/white holes with the correct internal vacuum energy, should be
able to support life. So a possible working definition of a causal cell is
a Schwarzschild metric that contains observers and thus constitute
somebody's "observable universe".

Although causal cells are by definition certainly *not* the entire
universe but instead simply a finite and causally self-contained region of
space-time in a  universe which is itself infinite in space and time.

Thus from the outside, causal cells have only the properties of
black/white holes. i.e. mass, spin, and charge. But from the inside, they
are "observable universes" in their own right.

> What I want
> to know is just who or what is putting together all these infinite
> possibilities?  These legos.  The proverbial monkeys?    I don't buy the
> argument that if it can happen, it will.  Does the universe have nothing
> to do but sit around and make copies of me differing only by one cell?

Nobody is putting together atoms to make you. It is just the truly
universal laws of physics like gravity, thermodynamics, and entropy
driving and constraining reality.

You are no more, or less, miraculous than water running down hill. If the
ingredients are present and the laws of physics are in place, your
existence is compulsory in a very small percentage of causal cells. Which,
if the universe is infinite, is an infinite number of them.

You are not what the universe *does*, you are a part of what the universe
*is*. The universe, like stable polities, are ruled by laws, and not men
or gods or even machines.

The whole trick of it is to figure out what those laws are.

Stuart LaForge