Dated 2005 April 17
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian/msg/6131dfb9beb7244b?dmode=source&hl=en
Dr. Jai Maharaj wrote:
Well, he did not actually write anothing, but posted an unusually
stupid article that based vast conclusions on a mere dozen anecdotal
biographies.
How does a person adopt a religion? When I was a child I noticed that,
based on hundreds of examples, that one could pretty well predict a
persons's religion from nothing more than their family name.
So, a few dozen anecdotal biographies is objectionable to say anything
based on, yet a few hundred snippets thereof seem to be all that's
needed.
Well, that doesn't quite tell us what makes people theists
They're born that way. There is a large genetic component that is (as
of recent weeks) known to underlie this.
What caused the universe, and why?
A different perspective on matters will help tremendously.
It is a true, but rarely-mentioned, fact that even though the structure
and nature of the universe (whether it be open and and infinite, flat
in each spatial section, or closed and balled up like a hypersphere) be
unknown, the nature and structure of the SKY is not!
The sky -- or in the parlance of modern Physics, the past light cone --
is topologically a hypersphere. At the antipode sits the singular event
alluded to by the very question you're asking.
The famous picture painted in the middle ages and recounted by Rudy
Rucker in his "Infinity and the Mind" comes home to roost. It's most
curious attribute, of course, being that it depicted the nested
sequence of spheres told of by Dante as *converging* onto Dante's
Empyrean (sp?). Instead of depicting this as the outermost region of
the universe, the painting depicted it as a single point shrouded in a
fog of brilliant light out of which emerged all sorts of spectres.
In other words, it depicted the heavens as the hypersphere that it
actually is, and the brilliant flash at the antipode which actually
exists there.
This picture is not just a metaphor. Apart from the allegorical
elements of angels emerging from the fog of brilliance, this is
actually what exists. The shroud of light is none other than the CMB,
delimiting the boundary of the first moment that outer space became
transparent. The nested series of spheres are representative of the
nested series of spheres that comprise the past light cone. Beyond a
certain point they cease to diverge and begin to converge all back onto
to a single point -- namely, that located around 12 billion (or 13 or
whatever the number is these days) years ago and light years away.
The unique feature of the Antipode is that it is precisely the one and
only point-instant in all of space-time that lies directly in the line
of sight of every other place in the Universe at every other time. It
is in the line of sight simultaneously in every direction at the same
distance away in each direction.
Conversely, if one were able to see all that lies on the future light
cone, then this would be the unique point from which everything in the
Universe would be directly visible.
Now, on to the matter alluded to in the topic...
These questions seem different on the surface, but all of them share
one quality that makes them impossible to answer: all of them are
circular! You can never find a final cause, since you must always ask
one question more: "What caused that cause?" You can never find any
ultimate goal, since you're always obliged to ask, "Then what purpose
does that serve?"
This is a fallacy. There is no logical inconsistency in the notion of a
first cause nor even in the notion of a self-created entity.
(1) The "Who Created The Creator?"/"Who Bore The Prime Progenitor?"
pseudo-paradox
Indeed, prior to the transformation of the older Goddess tradition
throughout much of Eurasia and the elevation of a Father-God as the
Supreme Being; the idea had been quite prevalent of a universe (and/or
a Goddess embodying it) not only being self-created, but self-conceived
and self-born. (It's still a concept that survives in vestigal form in
Hinduism).
Though it may seem inconsistent for finite entities, there is certainly
no inconsistency of this precept for entities that are infinite or
infinitely complex. Indeed, the one illustration by analogy I used in
the "Untold Story of the Creation of God by God" several years back (no
longer extant on the USENET, apparently; but alluded to at the end of
the last part of the "Untold Story of Contact", which *is* still on the
USENET) is to consider the sequence
....1101101011011010110101101101011010
and think of each "1" has having been brought forth by a prior
occurrence of a "11" preceding a "0", and each "0" has having been
brought forth by a prior occurrence of any other "1" preceding a "0".
The net result is the sequence, itself, which completes itself upon the
placing of the last 0.
This is an instance of an infinite nested series of structures, each
structure being spawned by a prior one, resulting finally in the entire
structure you see before you -- the Cosmic Bootstrap.
On the 2nd issue...
There is no inconsistency even for *finite* entities in the notion of a
self-creation or self-cause. It is entirely possible that the universe
may have closed timelike curves in it, enabling the existence of
entirely circular chains of events.
The most extreme example -- which brings us full circle -- is the idea
of a woman who bears a female offspring parthenogenically that ends up
going back and time and turns out to be the woman, herself.
There is, in fact, an entire branch of computation theory and logic now
centered on the Novakov Consistency Condition called Time Loop Logic,
introduced not long ago by Hans Moravic.
Some commentary on this matter from before is excerpted from and added
to:
Can the Second Law of Thermodynamics be Circumvented?
Dated 2005 July 6; sci.physics
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics/msg/27e5e8e3eda4e20b?dmode=source&hl=en
Button wrote:
Can the Second Law of Thermodynamics Be Circumvented?
Possibly. In the presence of CTC's [closed time-like curves in
spacetime] or other forms of achronal anomalies -- if such things
existed -- they could be violated by computations performing time loop
logic -- which defines a more powerful class of computation (possibly
beyond Turing Computability, I haven't looked into it in detail).
The wikipedia has an article on Time Loop Logic, the Novikov
Consistency condition (or conjecture), and a link to Hans Moravic's
Computation and Time Travel paper.
Since GR has solutions that go either way on the issue, this also
raises an obvious subtlety with any attempt to do statistical mechanics
or thermodynamics in GR. If there are CTC's, everything you usually
expect to see in thermodynamics will either break down or will have
serious modifications; just to ensure compliance with the Novikov
Consistency condition.
Quantum Theory, which seems to require a notion of time as a "flow" or
"arena for change" could not even be formulated along its usual lines
in such a setting, since there is no consistent way to assign a
"flowing time" interpretation in such a spacetime, CTC's being the very
antithesis of the notion of time as a flow. You normally need a "t"
coordinate or something like it when even writing down the basic laws
of quantum theory. Various attempts to do quantum physics (e.g. by
Morris, Thorne and my former thesis advisor Friedmann) had only met
with partial success, at best, and the issue remains unresolved.
.
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