Q&A

Q: "The only way for something to “not exist at all” is for no one to have ever even thought of it." is this necessarily true? what about all of the concepts that seem exist prior to our discovery or "awareness" of it? The field of mathematics, the numbers, concepts or sequences and series that infinitely exist, are we creating the patterns or do you think the patterns exist and we discover them?"

A: “The only way for something to “not exist at all” is for no one to have ever even thought of it.” Is this necessarily true? What about all of the concepts that seem exist prior to our discovery or “awareness” of it?

In short, something that exists now or in the past or future “exists” and therefore does not “not exist”. For something to “not exist at all” means that it never existed and never will exist, so math and the like that you’ve mentioned simply do not fall under this category. But of course that’s just another “definition” with zero relevance to “necessary truth” whatever that means, and right now I’m only arguing for the sake of the definition of “non-existence” I’ve created, which is in the grand search for meaning, supremely pointless, although not necessarily uninteresting.

On the other hand, whether mathematics, logic, and the like are “discovered” or “invented” is up to personal interpretation. There is no way of proving it, and since proof is based on logic, what it the point? Ever if we were to assume they were “discovered”, how do you know with certainty that they “existed” prior to discovery? The whole point is the existence of anything outside of awareness, whether in the past or future (or that would be non-sensical anyways because does time really exist outside of awareness anyways?), cannot be proved or disproved.

Perhaps you could try and distinguish things this way: that which has been “discovered” and exists in the present moment exists or does not exist with uncertainty in the past when it was not yet “discovered”. But in order for something to not exist definitively, it must not exist in any time, not in the past, now, or future, i.e. if can never “be discovered” because it does not exist, and in order for this to be true, no one must ever be able to think of if. So I suppose a slightly better way of trying to word it might be “the only way for something to “not exist at all” is for no one to have ever thought of it or ever be capable of thinking of it.” - which includes not only its possibility of existing in the past but also in the future.

I guess some people argue that the only things that “exist” are the things that exist in the “present moment”, but I don’t know what that means because I have no idea what “present moment” means or if it’s possible to have an infinitesimally small increment of time or if time even exists, and the existence of time outside of human perception can neither be proved nor disproved so long as you’re perceiving as a human. And of course this once again becomes a debate about what the word “exist” is defined as and the many other problematic words with definitions that it comes with.

Q: Why is it that various geologically isolated cultures “created”/”discovered” the same abstract patterns?

A: How should I know? Maybe it’s a property of the brain? Maybe we’re all aliens? Maybe we’re just all the same person? Maybe those things existed somewhere in the universe before? Etc., etc., I could come up with as many theories as I desire, but none of them could be “proven”, could they? And even if they could, what is the point of “proof”? What is “proof”?

Q&A

Q: "Elevated self importance in that the natural human tendency to relate all to one’s personal existence. Can you really assume your omnipresence? it seems that a major component to your conception of reality is the ability for there to be a manipulation in the space-time continuum or the fabric of some sense of reality as a result of human mental manipulation (hinging the reality of a phenomena {observed=unobserved} on the presence/lack thereof of your sense perception. also,The thing is about paradox’s is that they do not defy existence so much as they defy the reasoning made in the deductions prior to, My pointing out of the paradox was more of a means of making you question the conclusion in that single theory, can every possible chance (in the same multi-verse) exist at the same time? is there a line to be drawn on that separates the realms of reality if, by this reasoning, their existence contradicts? Non-existence is hinged on existence, you cannot have the concept of existence without the concept of non existence because with no contrast or polar opposite one can not know of either side. ( ex. We dont know what Cold is without measuring the amount of heat, vice versa, you dont know what light is without the existence of darkness) Parallelism may not be feasible because one can not know the outcome of said probability unless all other possibilities never happened. or to stretch even further, The existence of one universe may be hinged on the non existence of all others, or our knowledge or existence in one universe may be hinged on our non existence in others."

A: To clarify, all I assert is you cannot prove or disprove the existence of anything that is not consciously perceived by yourself. This has absolutely nothing to do with how or whether “human perception”, either sensory or mental is capable of experiencing whatever happens to exist. So no, I don’t believe “elevated self importance” according to how you’ve defined it is at all a key to what I posit - again, all I’m saying is whatever you do not “perceive” (through thought, imagination, comprehension or whatever other form of non-human perception that cannot be understood through human experience), its existence can neither be proved nor disproved. There is a big difference between simply “observing” something, that is, to consciously perceive it in one way or another and to “observe through human perception” - to assert that all that could ever exist lies within the set of the latter would obviously be short-sighted, and is not what I posit. In other words, by supposing that that which cannot be perceived cannot be proved or disproved to exist, it does not in any way exclude the possibility of experience that has not yet been experienced or comprehended previously.

You cannot know what light is without knowing darkness, but there is a very important distinction to make that involves “conscious” perception or awareness of what you are perceiving. That is, a person who has been blind from birth supposedly “perceives” darkness for his whole life, but you cannot say that only darkness exists for him and not light, not because “objectively” (whatever that means) darkness can only exist with light, but because he has never been consciously aware that this perception of absence of light was in fact a perception. For him, the existence or non existence of light can neither be proved nor disproved, but only understood theoretically and not experientially, and the problem of existence again becomes simply a matter of what you are willing to define as existence.

Your question - in a single theory, can every possible chance exist at the same time? - Why not? Is this not at the heart of quantum mechanics? In the absence of the act of “observation” (perception, consciousness, whatever you want to call it), all possible outcomes exist simultaneously, and yet upon observation the wave function collapses altogether leaving only a single outcome. It seems like the debate you are raising is only a matter of what to define as “reality” - only the collapsed wave function because it is not within the human realm of comprehension to understand what it means to have all possibilities exist simultaneously? Is this not the very supposition you were arguing against when you question the absurdity of “elevated self importance” in the set of all possible universes? On a grander scale, probability itself is just another human-comprehensible theory. What has whether or not something is consistent with “probability theory” as comprehended by man got anything to do with the vast sea of other possibilities that cannot be comprehended? Why should comprehension be a premise of perception?

Q&A

Q: "I'm not sure the sci-fi depiction of reality is feasible. What if there are billions of universes that exist in the theoretical realm, (the realm of perfection as plato called it, of the fibinacci sequences nature, and time) their existence is arguably just as real as ours, simply the collision of probability and predestination and manipulation by man(free will) determines the path of the reality we perceive subjectively."

A: What exactly is “the sci-fi depiction of reality”? Infinite universes already exist in the theoretical realm, and their existence as “real” depends entirely on your definition of “real” which becomes quite a meaningless distinction. Does “objective perception” have any meaning at all? To perceive is an inherently subjective act unless of course you suppose that all you perceive is all there will ever be, which can neither be proved nor disproved, but in the case that it’s true, there would be no distinction between objective and subjective, would there?

Q&A

Q: "It seems that you have this conception of elevated self importance in your multi-verse theory. Why is it that one's self has to permeate through all layers of the multiple universes? (multiple realities of one's self) In your theory it seems that parallelism and adjacent universes is key, but in a system of billions of different possibilities is parallelism even possible? ex. A "universe" where a multiverse exists, being parallel to a universe where there is nothing but singularity=a paradox."

A: What do you mean by “elevated self importance”? And what does “one’s self” mean? True, it would be absurd if my “identity as a person” had to permeate through all possible universes, but unless I am consciously aware in that universe, I cannot know that it exists. Of course I could suppose that there are infinite other universes where I am not consciously present, but once I think about the existence of that universe, am I not then present and part of that universe which exists in my mind? Once you observe something, it intrinsically changes from unobserved to observed, and unless I simply assume that such universes without my conscious observance do not exist, and thereby not think of then, then they cannot exist as universes without conscious awareness - obviously a paradox. But what does it mean to be a “paradox”? What is wrong or right about being a paradox? Why must being paradoxical entail non-existence?

In a system of “billions of different possibilities” but not infinite, how should I know whether parallelism is possible or what that even means? Why would it? Why wouldn’t it? But in an infinite set of possibilities, obviously it must.

Uncertainty is the Only Certainty (Death is NOT)

I saw a picture of this flying public artwork thing by Sebastian Errazuriz, and it intrigued me a little - it seemed to carry a lot of conceptual significance. (I’ve been questioning the significance and interpretation of conceptual art and design more and more ever since the time I approached that fashion designer guy to tell him how intrigued I was by his geometrically complex constructions, only to awkwardly find that he had no idea what hyperbolic geometry was and that his inspiration came purely from what he thought to be visually interesting, but this is different.) This flying all-caps sentence was extremely interesting to me not for the content itself, but the extent of further inquisition it raises - “death is the only certainty” - is it really now?

What I mean is not that there could be other certainties in life, but seriously, how could anyone ever assert that “death” is a certainty if no living person has any idea what death even is? I’ve come to realize that whenever anyone speaks any sentence, my mind immediately asks a million why’s and why not’s so quickly that it escapes my conscious awareness, but the most important ones pop out to my attention. This one especially. “Death is the only certainty” - forget the “in life” part, that makes it even more incredibly nonsensical, but sometimes I simply do not understand how people could completely overlook so, so many questions out there, making billions of assumptions every nanosecond of their lives without ever.. wondering - it’s absolutely incredible.

I have no idea how people, especially philosophers and other people doomed with a bunch of “knowledge”, just go around making these statements, statements of all different kinds, all consisting of words and concepts, concepts that they have absolutely no understanding that they have no understanding of, as if they had the slightest clue what they were actually talking about - this is just bizarre. But forget whether the people will ever have any hope of understanding. What I’m interested in is the curiosity of the statement and why/how it could possibly seem like a “true” statement to anyone.

“Death is the only certainty.” Rule #1: If you’re making a statement of any sort that you believe to have any relevance to anything at all, you have to understand what the words mean. Rule #2: Words about fundamental things have little meaning if any at all simply because by nature you have no idea what anything means, especially not if you want to put it in words. (Well, of course these rules have no meaning either, but the point is that I am frequently really bothered by the seemingly extreme ignorance of educated grown-up people, and I would like to point them out just in case.) So anyways, “death” - what in the world is “death”? Forget death, you want to say that it’s the state of ceasing to be alive? Well what in the world is “being alive”? What is the state of being “alive”? What does it mean to say that I am “alive” if I have no idea what it means to be “dead”?

Now, there is a very big difference between what it means to “be dead” versus the action of “dying”. The flying sentence seems to be talking about the latter. So we as “living” people have plenty of knowledge of what it means to die, perhaps physically, perhaps spiritually perhaps both, but not only do we know nothing about what happens after the act of dying, but there is in fact *no* possible way of knowing unless you are already in the state of being “dead”, and I mean exactly that. There are a series of infinite issues concerned with the state of “being dead” that basically reduce to 1) the act of other people dying outside of yourself has absolutely nothing to do with what it means to either “die” or “be dead” yourself 2) the act of “dying” as far as the word seems to be concerned, is the transition from being “alive” to being “dead”, but how on earth can we possibly begin to understand what it means to “die” if we have no idea what “alive” and “dead” are, i.e. 3) “I am alive” is an assumption - how in the world would I know if I’m “alive” if I have no idea what it means to be “dead”, in other words it’s just as meaningful to say “I’m dead” as it is to say “I’m alive”.

If you think about it, it could get as complicated, confusing, nonsensical, and completely meaningless as you want, but really all this is really doing is just creating another infinite set of unfalsifiable models of existence/reality/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. That’s the fun in these sentences that concern the fundamental nature of reality (which is really completely meaningless because it is all meaningful and vice versa). 

So start from the sentence “death is the only certainty in life” - bull shit!!! (But the most meaningful bull shit ever because it is completely meaningless, obviously, which is a good thing.) Everybody is going to die - false - but not true either, just unknown, uncertain, and completely meaningless. People “die” (or seem to anyways) outside of yourself, but just like anything else, that’s go absolutely nothing to do with dying with respect to myself. And now let me just create a few more fascinatingly magnificently terrifying and amazing theories of “life” - I could write a mansion full of books on this - novels, fiction, but not really, or not at all. Actually I’ll just write another post devoted to that.

Point being, “death is the only certainty in life” - what in the universe!?!?

How can space or time exist without physical objects and vice versa?

Space and time are the same - I don’t understand how they could exist without physical objects, just like physical objects could never exist without space and time. But we always talk about space and time as if they came before physical objects, how do we know that it wasn’t because of physical objects that space and time existed. But of course that’s a rather pointless question because it’s presupposing the existence of time for there to be an order to things, or it could just be asking the question, is time necessary for causality? Can causality exist independent of time? Association can, but can order? Order exists in space, but space and time are basically the same type of thing, they’re both media, for storage of information.. And I begin to be reminded that this must all just be a problem with the limitations of language to explain the concept that we already understand, have always held, in our way of experiencing or perceiving, but that cannot be conveyed through thought in the form of language. Or “thought” is only language, a product that “happens” but is not caused? At least not by intention. But arguing about all this is meaningless because of the nature of “truths” anyways, so just leave that.

Back to the problem - How can time exist without physical objects? I seem to have defined* “time” as the order of events happening between physical particles**. I said, if there are no events, how can there be time, how would we know if there were time, and more importantly, what difference would it make if there were or weren’t time if there were no events to happen anyways? And how could there be an event without a physical particle? Well, a physicist would say, that’s silly! Light exists, and light is not a physical particle. It could well be a particle, but it is not physical, and it takes “time” for a photon t travel from a point in space to another point. But that’s silly too! The time it takes for light to travel from one point depends on the reference frame of the observer, the motion, the relative velocity of the observer in the reference frame, but if no physical particles existed to be a observer in a reference frame, then how would we know how much “time” it takes for a light beam to travel from one point in space to another point in space?

Is saying that other photons exist in other reference frames to observe other traveling photons stupid? Time does not exist in the reference frame of a photon. For a photon there is no such thing as time, no such thing as velocity, no such thing as motion. But then what is a world completely devoid of physical particles but filled with empty space and photons? Does it even make sense to suppose the existence of empty space when the only existing particles are non-physical (by virtue of the same argument of time)? We, as perceivers only used to experiencing and perceiving a universe with both physical and non-physical matter could imagine a universe filled with empty space and photons, with photons moving from point to point at different “times” some before, some after, and at first sight it seems perfectly sensical, but immediately on second thought, how could this possibly be?

How could photon 1 start traveling from point A “before” photon 2 starts traveling from point A if time flowed for neither of them? Or imagining of that scenario requires us to “be there” to observe it, even if it is only a scenario in our heads, but by being there, we are the physical particles there to “observe” the photons. Photons cannot be observers because the act of observation seems to require “time” or at least anything that we, as human perceivers, could possibly imagine. But then isn’t it pointless to “think about” the non-existence of physical matter anyways? Since you would never be able to imagine it because the very act of imagining it, perceiving it, trying to perceive it at all creates its existence.. Just like everything else.. But what if it’s completely “internal”? Having nothing to do with the physical world, but only with what “goes on” in the mind?

What is an event in the mind? It requires no physical objects at all! It requires no “real” physical objects, but then are we saying that just because a physical object that exists purely in the mind if not “physical” at all simply because it is not “real”? It seems that everything and anything “real” has the exact same properties as everything and anything “imaginary” except that one is real and the other is imaginary; one exists in the “real world”, and one exists in the “mind”. So I don’t think that just because an imagined physical object is not real, it is not physical, so to say. And so we are going in circles once again, trying to “imagine” the unimaginable but circularly causing the imaginable just because we are “imagining” the unimaginable, which is not being “imagined”.. I think that the conclusion always gets to the same basic point - that creation creates itself, everything and anything creates itself and itself and itself, and back the the problem of zeros and ones and ones only creating ones and zeros only being zeros all over again. Everything is so unimaginably “simple”. “Simple”.

*Not a good thing. I use the term “define” loosely here. I don’t want to give anything a definite definition.

**By “physical particle” I really just mean non-relativistic. I’m not really sure what being a “physical” particle would entail anyways (as opposed to an “imaginary” particle?) not sure why I just completely forgot about the term “non-relativistic”. Sorry.

One and Zero

What is the nature of numbers? What do numbers mean? How can numbers exist? How can anything besides the number one exist? Everything is a multiple of one thing, but slicing one thing in half gives you two, two of one, and there is always still a one, nothing else but “two” ones, not a “two”, but “two” “ones”. One has a fundamentally different property than two, three, or so one. Anything above “one” is only an invented “concept”. One is the only thing that exists, and multiplying it or dividing it only gives you more of “one” but nothing else.

But you cannot do anything without something to start with, that is, only ones can come out of ones, and only zeros can come out of zeros, but what does it mean to multiply or divide anything by a zero? The difference between a zero and a one is that one exists, and one does not exist at all. One signifies everything and anything, and zero signifies nothing at all. So are zero and one the only things that exist objectively? Must they be objective? But how could zero and one be subjective? How could existing and not existing be subjective? 

(And then a strange feeling of existence like computers, everything as computers, and codes, patterns as everything.)

Q&A

Q: Why do I think probability is irrelevant when it comes to things like the existence of God and other peoples’ consciousness? Why is this talk of “likelihood” or “probability” meaningless, and why should I not be justified to say that it is more likely that individual consciousness of others exist than to say that God exists from an “evidential” standpoint?

A: So there are two things we need to get straight* here: probability and evidence. First of all, what is the probability of something? It is the number of a certain type of outcome divided by the number of all possible outcomes. What does it mean to talk about the probability of God existing? I would say it’s the number of possible models of the universe where a god exists divided by the number of total possible models of the universe. As for “models of the universe”, of course there are unfalsifiable ones as well as falsifiable ones - both of which there are an infinite number of. We disregard the falsifiable ones because they must all be false if they are falsifiable** and look at the unfalsifiable ones. Because there are an infinite number of possible unfalsifiable models for universes in which God either exists or doesn’t, it doesn’t seem to make sense to talk about probabilities with regard to this question. Same reasoning for the existence of other peoples’ consciousness.

Ok, now you’re going to say that there is evidence for the existence of others’ consciousness, and there is no apparent evidence for God’s existence. What do you mean by evidence? Is there really any evidence from which we can infer directly the existence of others’ consciousness or God? Behavior does not count! Sure, you can try and make an indirect inference, but you have to realize that you will never be able to find any sort of direct evidence for the existence of others’ consciousness unless you are that person (which defeats the point anyways). And then you might say that at least there’s indirect evidence of the existence of others’ consciousness, but there is none for the existence of God. And again, what are you counting as “evidence”? (Also see the real vs. imaginary people post.) Also more importantly, any talk of evidence vs. no evidence regards models that are falsifiable, and by virtue of the incompleteness theorem***, we already said that any sort of falsifiable model cannot be a complete model that describes the universe if we are describing it as an inhabitant inside the universe, so it’s unclear whether there is even a point in discussing “evidence”.

*I am always hesitant to bring in “definitions” because they mess things up a lot and turn things into war of words rather than meaning, as you know.

** Think about it. You can’t describe anything in its entirety from the inside (which is where we’re at, in the universe). i.e., incompleteness theorem.

*** The incompleteness theorem is indeed a wonderful thing, but we cannot forget that the validity of it as applied toward consciousness and/or the universe is entirely dependent on whether consciousness and/or the universe can be described as a formal system. The incompleteness theorem is a mathematical theory, and there is no reason why we should simply assume that anything can be described as a formal system.

Time Dependent Existence?

Is my existence time dependent even when I think I’m alive?