What's your take on time travel?
- Thread starter RiksRiks
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TedEH
Cromulent
Except that, no, that's not how being startled works. Being startled is not an immediate current state of physical input senses. You cannot be startled without first developing an expectation and then having that expectation violated. The experience of the present can not exist without the consideration and context created by the time before and after it.
Again, I can appreciate the sentiment that you're going for, but you can't "turn your mind off" in that way. That's not a thing. Just because you are not literally thinking of things in terms of "Oh I like this sunset, remember that time I saw something a long time ago in the sky and it wasn't as impressive as this?" does not mean that past experiences are removed from how you process the present.
Being mindful of what is current and present? Yeah, sure. But "you are not experiencing the present unless you are not thinking" just doesn't make any sense. What you're describing is simply focusing on the present moment, not anything to do with "freeing your mind" in some way.
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Eh, under the premise of infinite universes, given that there would be both an infinite number of universes with physical laws identical to ours as well as with physical laws that are completely incompatible with our own, the odds of landing in either even if we could travel between universes is... well, utterly incalculable.
Also, given that we're dealing with something that literally can't be counted, can we really say that there would be a majority of anything, or that such a concept is even applicable? It's not like we're dealing with grains of sand on the earth where, even though it's an absolutely massive number, we can statistically make reasonably accurate determinations on the average composition of that sand, or even something like the composition of this universe where we can assume that, taken over a massive scale, it's generally homogeneous.
I don't really follow. My point was that even with an assumption of infinite possibilities, there would be an infinitesimal amount where humans (and existence as we know it) would remain compatible between universes.
e.g. Change something like the strong nuclear force by even a micro fraction of a percent and your body (and all matter as we know it) flies apart (or clumps together).
The definition of fear, going by the Oxford English dictionary (aka probably the closest thing we have to an authoritative source on the meaning of words in the English language) encompasses what you call being startled. It also encompasses what you describe, which when I read it, I would have more readily described it as dread or anxiety.
I was initially confused by your first response to my post, then I read this. If that's what you got from my other post, you need to re-read it, because that's definitely not what I said or even implied. My point was what we thought was a metaphorical telescope was actually a metaphorical hamster the entire time, but because of the limitations of the constructs of observation and experience that are ultimately imposed by our own biology, we were too stupid to know any better.
Oookay, now we're veering into choppier waters here. Conceptually I have no issue with the idea of trying to expand consciousness, but the fact is there is no practicable method of doing so. Expressions like "free your mind" and "see things are they are," while occasionally helpful thought exercises that can aid us when trying to approach the challenges of daily life from an alternate mental perspective, are ultimately platitudes, and utterly meaningless ones if the person stating them is intending them to be taken literally, to the same degree as something like "you will find peace by aligning your frequency with the harmonics of the universe." There is nothing mystical about the altered states brought on by things like meditation or drugs. What some perceive as "higher states" brought on by such things is simply the reaction of our biology operating under atypical circumstances. There is no such thing as "freeing oneself from thought." Aside from doing so by dying, it's a physical impossibility.
As far as seeing things as they are, either a person's eyes and visual cortex are functioning correctly or they aren't, that's the only thing that governs how well a person sees in the physical sense. Processing the information provided by those senses and ascribing context and abstract meaning to it is ultimately governed by the neural networks formed in the brain as a result of our experiences, and subject to whatever physical abnormalities that might cause it to have impaired function. Circling back to the point I made in my other post, though, we base our actions and decisions on the basis of not only assuming a certain degree of accuracy in how well our senses and mental faculties function, but also that what we perceive externally, the world we see through our eyes, is the physical world we exist in. If they're compromised, we'd often have no way of knowing. My father thought the entire world was a blurry mess until he was 12 years old, when someone finally figured out, "hey, this kid is blind as a bat, maybe someone should get him some glasses." When my great uncle was lying on his death bed, he had dementia and was experiencing a narrative that had nothing to do with the physical world around him. At the end of the day, the notion that we can find ultimate objective truth based on the input from our senses is foolish, because our senses are bags of meat that will one day rot away. That's the hamster. All we can do is accept that this is the existence we experience and, regardless of whether it's substantive and legitimate, this is the one we have to live in.
I get that, and I'll try to be more succinct. Let's say you want to calculate all possible results for variable x, given the range 1 < x < 1.0000000000000001. Even though we've applied a very specific set of conditions, there's still an infinite set of distinct real numbers that meet that criteria, a set of ordinal numbers that, despite being countable, has infinite cardinality (if I remember my math terminology correctly).
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DudeManBrother
Hey...how did everybody get in my room?
Why turn such a simple observation into some nonsensical hippy bullshit. It’s not about meditation or higher consciousness. There is no philosophy of “free your mind maaaaan” as that’s just as ludicrous as “the world is actually a hamster maaaaaan”. Obviously the mind still functions. I’m talking about getting carried away in thought. This is how we spend the majority of our “time”. We’re thinking about the past or we’re thinking about the future. Very rarely do we just sit fully engaged in what’s happening right now. Maybe once in a while, if it’s something new or exciting; but the mundane day to day experience is largely brushed over by thinking about anything else. I never said you should be more present, nor spend more time without engaging thought; just that in the moments that you don’t get caught up in some thought train: you find yourself, undistracted, fully experiencing right now. That’s all. It’s not better or worse that being carried away in thought. It won’t change the world. It’s just the thing that’s always there whether we recognize it or not.
Alright, I figured out what's going on here. We're both subject to our own poor wording as well as incorrect interpretation of what the other person is saying. Ironically, we're actually making the same argument.
When you said "One must free themselves from thought to experience the present" and "Just see things exactly as they are" (verbatim quotes), I interpreted that as the same "nonsensical hippie bullshit" that you got from what I said.
TedEH
Cromulent
^ This is also how I read those comments, to be fair.
DudeManBrother
Hey...how did everybody get in my room?
Maybe saying “freedom from engaging the wandering thoughts that distract you from the present moment” would be more clear? Seems about the same to me. Either way: it’s just an observation in a thread about potential future time travel to the past. Most of our time is focused on past and future anyways. It doesn’t mean it’s better or ideal. I was just trying to describe those short moments when your head is clear and you’re not actively thinking about anything. They seem to be few and far between; which is fascinating to me.
^ This is also how I read those comments, to be fair.
TedEH
Cromulent
Yeh, that's more clear.
HeavyMetal4Ever
Well-Known Member
Human nature being what it is, anyone with access to travelling back in time would use this to their advantage.
I can easily prove to myself that I will never have such access, because if I did my future self would have already come back in time and given my past self beneficial information. The fact that i'm not outrageously rich tells me it's a big NO
I can easily prove to myself that I will never have such access, because if I did my future self would have already come back in time and given my past self beneficial information. The fact that i'm not outrageously rich tells me it's a big NO
jaxadam
Well-Known Member
TedEH
Cromulent
I am extremely skeptical.
Travel back in time is potentially possible, but not in any way that could ever be of any use whatsoever.
Also, faster-than-light travel is something physicists keep bumping into, but every time an experiment shows that it is possible, it turns out to be some stupid error. ...except one study on quantum entanglement that seems to turn a few things upside-down, but, again, the constraints seem to make the phenomenon impractical to put to use.
Ok, so time travel: it has been conjectured that degrees of freedom may be constant in our universe, such that we may be able to trade a spacial freedom for a time freedom. The mathematics used to justify that thought are really nifty, but not too well understood, given the amount of energy necessary to probe the dimensionality of spacetime itself. The only way to really test this would be to chuck a device beyond the event horizon of a black hole and have it try to go back in time and observe other objects within its space. But the event horizon itself disallows information to leave, we would never be able to retrieve the data.
FTL travel - you can entangle two particles in quantum mechanics. For example, any two photons can be entangled if they both came from the same parent photon. Decades ago, we learned that the entanglement persists after the particles are separated by an arbitrary distance as long as they are not disentangled by interaction with another particle. So, if you measure the polarization of one photon, you immediately know the polarization of the sister photon, even if it is a billion miles away. The practical problem is that there is no practical application.
Also, faster-than-light travel is something physicists keep bumping into, but every time an experiment shows that it is possible, it turns out to be some stupid error. ...except one study on quantum entanglement that seems to turn a few things upside-down, but, again, the constraints seem to make the phenomenon impractical to put to use.
Ok, so time travel: it has been conjectured that degrees of freedom may be constant in our universe, such that we may be able to trade a spacial freedom for a time freedom. The mathematics used to justify that thought are really nifty, but not too well understood, given the amount of energy necessary to probe the dimensionality of spacetime itself. The only way to really test this would be to chuck a device beyond the event horizon of a black hole and have it try to go back in time and observe other objects within its space. But the event horizon itself disallows information to leave, we would never be able to retrieve the data.
FTL travel - you can entangle two particles in quantum mechanics. For example, any two photons can be entangled if they both came from the same parent photon. Decades ago, we learned that the entanglement persists after the particles are separated by an arbitrary distance as long as they are not disentangled by interaction with another particle. So, if you measure the polarization of one photon, you immediately know the polarization of the sister photon, even if it is a billion miles away. The practical problem is that there is no practical application.
