Born To Do Math 196: Times, Spaces, Minkowskian and Cartesian Coordinates
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/16
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Along the world line, what is a set of reasonable next possible moments in that universe?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: And so, that would be more building into the assumption of a second layer, that argument, which is you can have single moments, certainly. Which is a universe that doesn’t have a moment, non-existence, then some wide array of spatial arrangements that act. That have no temporal dimension. They are in some particular shape and cues here.
Rosner: I’m not sure you can have space without time. It’s all part of a package that I want to say is unitary, but that’s probably not the right word. For something to have space, it has to have matter. It has to have the history that it apparently created that space and the matter in it.
Jacobsen: Is it possible to have a universe of time as something that doesn’t function by Minkowskian space? It’s just this Cartesian system. There is no time. Or does it naturally have to have a history? Is that the only way to be changed?
Rosner: There is probably a math of this stuff. It’s very quantum mechanics savvy. There is room in the math to go from an apparently existent universe to the next moment of complete non-existence, just a very improbable statistical blip that ceases to exist in the next moment.
It’s just if you’re looking at the set of next possible moments for a universe that exists; it’s an unlikely next possible moment. Also, you can make the argument, as you’re saying in reverse. That the universe can blip up into, apparently, complex existence, having not existed, not existed before and not existed after that.
You just get a single moment or a couple of moments and then it disappears. There is a statistical argument against that. When you look at all the sets of all temporarily adjacent universes, the blip universe is the zero information; that as possible moment is unlikely compared to everything else.
Jacobsen: And that’s actually a cornerstone of the general idea, I think, which is persistence. Things that exist will likely persist, more than not. I think, and again, it’s just based on you taking the two sets together and things will likely persist as opposed to not.
Rosner: Any argument with probability is extended from quantum mechanics. Otherwise, these arguments are probably in trouble because we don’t know what we’re dealing with mathematically. Also, I don’t know if you can go from an existing universe to pure nothingness.
You probably can, or whether there have to be transformations to cover the loss of all that information. You’ve got a universe. The temperature of our universe is 2.7 degrees (Kelvin)? The temperature of the background radiation, microwave radiation.
It’s cool because it has had 14 billion years to cool down and to erase all the information you need to keep the universe up into pure chaos. Can you raise the temperature to the point where all information disappears in an instant? Probably so.
But there is the possibility that you need to propagate a wave of high temperature across the space that you have to erase it. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter in terms of the arguments you’re making.
Jacobsen: And so, take a step back.
Rosner: Similar to the argument, if it were in mind terms, you’ve got a mind with a picture of consciousness, the picture of reality. Say you’re on one of the planes in 9/11 hitting the World Trade Centers, if you do the math, those people were obliterated in some crazy fraction of a second. Just a horrible, horrible fraction of a second.
Jacobsen: A terrible example, a clear but tragic example.
Rosner: Yes. So, what happens to those people’s thoughts in that instance? Do they have a perceptible moment of the loss of all information?
Jacobsen: If you were to go nanosecond by nanosecond and the person was facing forward, you would see the mental landscape deteriorate.
Rosner: A terrible fraction of a second. I’ve thought about what that second would look like and it would be bad.
Jacobsen: Like the deterioration of the frontal lobes, followed by the temporal and parietal lobe followed by the occipital lobe, so, vision in terms of imagination would be the last thing to go strangely enough.
Rosner: So does that necessitate like a transitional moment or fraction of a moment or something that? I don’t know. Anyway, it’s a thing to look at.
Jacobsen: Yes. So, all in all, without the math of it, I don’t think that’s the focus here. In fact, we don’t have the math of it. Just in terms of the philosophy, the general philosophy of it, you do have a larger set of those; that which can exist.
You also have a set of universes where it’s still existing larger than not. So, this is both an existence argument there and a temporal argument. So, running the numbers, you have a statistical consideration of both existence and time.
Things will generally persist. Although, they can wink out or they can devolve into a null state. I think the only way in which we know agency comes to be in a natural universe is evolution.
So, you will need existence and you will need time to come to any form of agency. Even if they have simulated agency, you still have the evolved agency behind this.
Rosner: Because the deal with a simulated world is that it implies, it necessitates; unless, you’re doing that statistical argument. It just blipped into existence, which is unlikely. The odds are infinitesimal. So, a small simulated world implies a wider world, probably.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 