This is Cool

I have apparently explained myself poorly. Perhaps an analogy would be more clear, particularly when I talk about constructs of the mind and matter.

I live in a house which includes a living room. Lovely room, high ceilings, oak floors, big leather chair in the corner where I read. You get the picture. The living room clearly is something I can point to (there it is) and is constructed of various materials yet living room is also a construct of my mind. It is an outgrowth of the physical manifestation, but they are not entirely independent of each other. I could replace the oak flooring with maple, remove the sheet rock and replace it with paneling (yeech!), in fact I could remove and replace every part down to the 2x6s in the walls and it would still be living room. I could then take all of the parts that I removed and reassemble them elsewhere as a place to store stuff but the result would not be living room. This much it seems we agree on. But, if I didn't replace those parts with other parts, living room disappears. I'm merely outside. So living room is a functional description and also a real physical thing.

So when I read this:

"We are not made of matter but process it. "

I have a fundamental disagreement. We are indeed made of matter. That matter changes at the molecular level, and even at the macro level, and we're still us. But if there was no matter, we wouldn't exist.

Also, I don't think it is entirely correct to say (I assume you're referring to dark matter here):

"96% of the known universe is not matter."

I would add "as we understand it today". Like I said, we detect it via gravity so we know there's something, we're just not sure what, so it seems to be a leap to say that it's immaterial.

My comment regarding spirituality was perhaps premature. All I can say is that I've had conversations like this before and inevitably that's where they lead. Using the "not made of matter but process it" comment as an example, I have heard people use this line of argument to attempt to show that humans are "spiritual creatures", that there is "another plane of existence", etc.

In closing, I understand that forum policy is to avoid discussion of politics and religion. I haven't seen anything prohibiting discussion of philosophy, though. ;-)

Dark matter and dark energy don't fit our current definitions of matter. We don't know what they are. If we know 5% of something then maybe we should not be too sure of our notions of reality.

Not that I was trying to be particular when wondering about "non-material forces" projecting to the surface of a holographic universe. The point I (hitherto forlornly) tried to make was that if the galaxies all lie on the surface of a sphere, and we're on the surface of the sphere, then there's got to be something in the middle, doesn't there? There's an outside, there's an inside. Stands to reason. And if there is something inside the sphere, you can be sure that its goings on will affect what happens on the surface.

That's all I was trying to say the first place but triggered your tribal atheist reflex . The irony is, I wasn't trying to make a statement of fact. Just wondering about the possible dynamics of holographic theory, a theory I never cared for anyway.

As for the living room analogy, it reminds me of the "what is an object?" riddle raised in philosophy forums. In the end they drill down to objects being only a construct of our minds, with the delineation between "object" and "environment" being arbitrarily affected by our mammalian senses. And so on.

You could say the same thing about life. In fact, you can say it about anything, and the final upshot would be nothing is real but thinking makes it so. Or on the other hand you could say that human constructs are as much a part and expression of the universe as much as anything else.

Life is different to an architectural plan in the same way that evolution is different to creationism. One is static and the other dynamic. That makes all the difference because life is nothing if not a metabolism, which is a temporary, dynamic, self-sustaining set of processes (all of which can theoretically be described by algorithms) - gathering, processing and outputting energy and information. Nothing controversial about that.

Musos have a long history of being amateur philosophers. If we're going to do something that is basically a celebration of being alive, it's no surprise that a lot of us will sometimes think about what we're actually celebrating

Anon La Ply said:

The point I (hitherto forlornly) tried to make was that if the galaxies all lie on the surface of a sphere, and we're on the surface of the sphere, then there's got to be something in the middle, doesn't there? There's an outside, there's an inside.

Click to expand...

Not really. If a 2D surface is warped into a 3D sphere, there is no "inside" to the sphere for our 2D creatures. We see the three dimensions because we're 3D. It's an imperfect analogy because I don't think we (as 3D people) can really imagine what being 2D is, anymore than we can accurately imagine what being 4D is like. We're saying that their "space" is the sheet and it's warped into a sphere. What we see as the inside of the sphere is not their space. If it was, it would blow apart the whole idea of the big bang-expanding balloon analogy because it implies that the universe is expanding into something rather than space itself expanding. We humans can do the math but I'm not sure we can ever visualize this on an intuitive level. I fear we are just to tied to our 3D biology. But consider if the universe was negatively curved instead of positively curved. Our 2D sheet universe would wind up looking something like a saddle that extended forever (or think of two U shapes, one up, one down, at right angles to each other). How would we define the "inside" or "outside" in that case? Or think of a Mobius Strip. It's definitely a 3D object yet it only has one side (ignoring the edge, and literally, that's one edge). But if I'm on "one side" of a Mobius Strip, what space is the "other side"? It's a false question. The "other side" is the side I'm on currently.

"atheist tribal reflex"- never heard that one before but I must admit to a reflex reaction whenever I suspect Cartesian Dualism is about to rear its ugly head!

It is interesting how this thread has evolved. I fear, however, that it is an evolutionary dead end and we have lost all other initial participants. I enjoy discussing philosophy, primarily when it intersects math and science, but I think it puts most people off. Besides, my knowledge of the subject is largely self-taught so it's doubtful I'm going to come up with anything truly insightful. The amateur's technique and all...

If I was putting my hard-earned on a model I'd go for string theory, with branes colliding and creating multiple "bubble" universes. The theory has been around for a long time and after all the checking the boffins still report that the math is still "beautiful". That tends to be the case with discoveries later verified by experiment.

Trouble is we can't observe of the very big and very small. As you say, we're limited, though I suspect AI enhancements will change that situation in time.

There's millions of theism/atheism, dualist/monist arguments on the web and everyone seems sure of themselves. It's almost as if they had more of a clue than the rest of us

The thread needs more science videos. This one's not cool - just a lecture - but the ideas presented are something I've not heard elsewhere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElMqwgkXguw

And this video is just plain cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT8bms2RHe8