Markings

"A Problem with the Multiverse Idea: The notion that our universe is part of a vast or infinite..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:41:24 -0700

“A Problem with the Multiverse Idea:

The notion that our universe is part of a vast or infinite multiverse is popular—and understandably so, because it is based on a methodological error that is easy to fall into.

Our current theories can work at the level of the universe only if our universe is a subsystem of a larger system. So we invent a fictional environment and fill it with other universes. This cannot lead to any real scientific progress, because we cannot confirm or falsify any hypothesis about universes causally disconnected from our own.”

- Lee Smolin, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe

"Nature’s Laws Evolve in Time: Laws, then, are not imposed on the universe from outside it. No..."

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:39:29 -0700

“Nature’s Laws Evolve in Time:

Laws, then, are not imposed on the universe from outside it. No external entity, whether divine or mathematical, specifies in advance what the laws of nature are to be. Nor do the laws of nature wait, mute, outside of time for the universe to begin.

Rather the laws of nature emerge from inside the universe and evolve in time with the universe they describe.”

- Lee Smolin, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe

"Inner Consciousness: Of the mind, the inner consciousness, the soul, my prayer desired that I..."

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 12:27:25 -0700

“

Inner Consciousness:

Of the mind, the inner consciousness, the soul, my prayer desired that I might discover a mode of life for it, so that it might not only conceive of such a life, but actually enjoy it on the earth.

I wished to search out a new and higher set of ideas on which the mind should work.

”

- Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart: An Autobiography

"Time & Future: But if time is real, the future is not determinable from knowledge of the..."

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 09:10:09 -0700

“Time & Future:

But if time is real, the future is not determinable from knowledge of the present.”

- Lee Smolin, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe

"To Think in Time: On a personal level, to think in time is to accept the uncertainty of life as the..."

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 07:55:37 -0700

“To Think in Time:

On a personal level, to think in time is to accept the uncertainty of life as the necessary price of being alive.

To rebel against the precariousness of life, to reject uncertainty, to adopt a zero tolerance to risk, to imagine that life can be organized to completely eliminate danger, is to think outside time.

To be human is to live suspended between danger and opportunity.”

- Lee Smolin, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe

"Brain Is Only a Receiver: My brain is only a receiver, in the universe there is a core from which we..."

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 06:52:39 -0700

“Brain Is Only a Receiver:

My brain is only a receiver, in the universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength, inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”

- Nikola Tesla (via samsaranmusing)

How Much Consciousness Does an iPhone Have? : The New...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 06:48:03 -0700

How Much Consciousness Does an iPhone Have? : The New Yorker

"Immortality: Resting by the tumulus [burial site], the spirit of the man who had been interred there..."

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 07:02:15 -0700

“Immortality:

Resting by the tumulus [burial site], the spirit of the man who had been interred there was to me really alive, and very close.

This was quite natural, as natural and simple as the grass waving in the wind, the bees humming, and the larks’ songs.

Only by the strongest effort of the mind could I understand the idea of extinction; that was supernatural, requiring a miracle; the immortality of the soul natural, like earth.

Listening to the sighing of the grass I felt immortality as I felt the beauty of the summer morning, and I thought beyond immortality, of other conditions, more beautiful than existence, higher than immortality.”

- Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart: An Autobiography

"The Moment of Time: Embracing time means believing that reality consists only of what’s real in each..."

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 07:36:07 -0700

“The Moment of Time:

Embracing time means believing that reality consists only of what’s real in each moment of time.

Thinking in time is not relativism but a form of relationalism—a philosophy that asserts that the truest description of something consists of specifying its relationships to the other parts of the system it is part of.”

- Lee Smolin, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe

"Time is Real: Every journey has a lesson to teach, and mine has been to realize just how radical an..."

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 07:41:00 -0700

“Time is Real:

Every journey has a lesson to teach, and mine has been to realize just how radical an idea is contained in the simple statement that time is real.

Having begun my life in science searching for the equation beyond time, I now believe that the deepest secret of the universe is that its essence rests in how it unfolds moment by moment in time.”

- Lee Smolin, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe

"The cosmos’s next big leaps: But we are the most complex social project that protons and..."

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 06:48:32 -0700

“The cosmos’s next big leaps:

But we are the most complex social project that protons and electrons have ever attempted to achieve.

We are the repeaters of the ancient patterns of attraction and repulsion, repeaters through whom the cosmos has sketched new big pictures and woven new tapestries.

We are the cosmos’s tools for fantasy. We are her first vessels of dreams. And yet we are only the foothills. Only the stepping stones. Only the starting blocks for the cosmos’s next big leaps.”

- Howard Bloom, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates

"Magic beans: The history of the axiom hints that an entire cosmos may have grown from a handful of..."

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 07:45:42 -0700

“Magic beans:

The history of the axiom hints that an entire cosmos may have grown from a handful of magic beans, a handful of primal commandments.”

- Howard Bloom, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates

"We are all children: We are all children of the big bang. We are all children of the same starting..."

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 06:55:00 -0700

“We are all children:

We are all children of the big bang.

We are all children of the same starting algorithms, the same deep structures, the same Ur patterns, the same handful of cosmic commandments.

We are all children of attraction and repulsion and their spinoffs, differentiation and integration—children of opposites joined at the hip.

We are all children of a cosmos of enormous cruelty and of staggering wonders, children of a universe that in the long run always steps up, not down.”

- Howard Bloom, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates

"Rules that have knit a universe: And there is more than an even chance that we humans have free..."

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 06:44:10 -0700

“Rules that have knit a universe:

And there is more than an even chance that we humans have free will, competition, dominance hierarchies, love, and war because we inherited them from the cosmos that gave us birth.

There is more than an even chance that we have free will, competition, dominance hierarchies, love, and war because these things were basic patterns that shaped the behavior of the earliest particles, atoms, and colonies of cells.

There is also more than an even chance that we have these nasty—and sometimes brilliantly creative—characteristics because they are deep structures, Ur patterns. Because they are patterns that repeat over and over again in each new medium that the cosmos generates, from the massive slowdown of particle ricochets 380,000 years after the big bang through the evolution of the first cell to the evolution of your mind and mine.

There is more than an even chance that we have free will, competition, dominance hierarchies, love, and war because they are patterns like the basic rules of the steelmaker and of Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractal set. Rules that, when repeated in a new medium, make radically new things. Rules that have been repeated trillions of trillions of times to fashion new mediums, new contexts, new realities. Rules that have been repeated with unstoppable persistence. Rules that have knit a universe.”

- Howard Bloom, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates

"Consciousness gives meaning to the universe: [The observer] gives the world the power to come into..."

Fri, 31 May 2013 08:01:27 -0700

“Consciousness gives meaning to the universe:

[The observer] gives the world the power to come into being, through the very act of giving meaning to that world; in brief, “No consciousness; no communicating community to establish meaning? Then no world!” … The universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.
—John Wheeler, physicist

We don’t know if Wheeler’s intuition is apt or not, or if the extrapolation from particles to the universe even makes sense. Quantum correlations are fragile and hard to maintain. But his delayed choice experiment does make one wonder whether we define the physical reality we live in. It’s a possibility that surely horrified Einstein but that experiments seem to be making ever more compelling.”

- Marcelo Gleiser’s Blog at: http://t.co/DFw7cWSu6a

"Human Role: Is a human a molecule’s way of making new molecules? More to the point, is a..."

Thu, 30 May 2013 07:38:00 -0700

“Human Role:

Is a human a molecule’s way of making new molecules?

More to the point, is a human a tool with which the cosmos summons a molecular structure from the realm of the implicate into the hard and fast of reality?

Is a human a tool with which the cosmos feels out her potential?

Is a human a tool that the cosmos uses to create?”

- Howard Bloom, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates

"The Creative Brain: The brain painted the world with color, he once had thought, made it alive with..."

Wed, 29 May 2013 07:50:52 -0700

“The Creative Brain:

The brain painted the world with color, he once had thought, made it alive with sound, and gave it taste and smell, but now he felt the brain did more than paint:
the brain dreamed up and forged all things that were—lutes, rooms, mountains planets and stars.”

- Giulio Tononi, Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul

"Philosophy Isn’t Dead Yet: …there could not be a worse time for philosophers to..."

Tue, 28 May 2013 07:52:00 -0700

“Philosophy Isn’t Dead Yet:

…there could not be a worse time for philosophers to surrender the baton of metaphysical inquiry to physicists. Fundamental physics is in a metaphysical mess and needs help.

The attempt to reconcile its two big theories, general relativity and quantum mechanics, has stalled for nearly 40 years. Endeavours to unite them, such as string theory, are mathematically ingenious but incomprehensible even to many who work with them. This is well known. A better-kept secret is that at the heart of quantum mechanics is a disturbing paradox – the so-called measurement problem, arising ultimately out of the Uncertainty Principle – which apparently demonstrates that the very measurements that have established and confirmed quantum theory should be impossible.

Beyond these domestic problems there is the failure of physics to accommodate conscious beings. The attempt to fit consciousness into the material world, usually by identifying it with activity in the brain, has failed dismally, if only because there is no way of accounting for the fact that certain nerve impulses are supposed to be conscious (of themselves or of the world) while the overwhelming majority (physically essentially the same) are not. In short, physics does not allow for the strange fact that matter reveals itself to material objects (such as physicists).”

- Raymond Tallis, Philosophy Isn’t Dead Yet at: http://t.co/PnylckQVOC

"The Human Form: I believe in the human form; let me find something, some method, by which that form..."

Sat, 25 May 2013 07:04:38 -0700

“The Human Form:

I believe in the human form; let me find something, some method, by which that form may achieve the utmost beauty. Its beauty is like an arrow, which may be shot any distance according to the strength of the bow. So the idea expressed in the human shape is capable of indefinite expansion and elevation of beauty.”

- Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart: An Autobiography

"The Bewildering Gap Between Mind and Matter: We are now in a position to dissolve the bewildering..."

Fri, 24 May 2013 06:54:51 -0700

“The Bewildering Gap Between Mind and Matter:

We are now in a position to dissolve the bewildering gap between mind and matter played out in debates between materialists, idealists, and dualists.

[The philosopher] Whitehead invites us to consider the possibility that all of actuality, whether objective or subjective, is composed of just one kind of entity: “actual occasions.”

Experienced from the outside, actual occasions are objective events; experienced from the inside, they are drops of experience.”

- Eric Weiss, The Long Trajectory