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An Agnostic Ponders Reincarnation
11 min read
Have you ever met someone who claims to believe that, after death, there is nothing?
Can you clearly understand the meaning of such a claim?
If you do, please try to explicate it, in the comments section, because,
frankly, I don’t get it, and I say that, because, whenever you lose consciousness,
time whizzes by you at infinite speed. When you wake up, after total anesthesia,
you have no subjective clue as to whether you were unconscious for a minute,
or a billion years.
So, if you die, and there is nothing after death, then, in an instant
(from your point of view) you should move forward an infinite amount of time.
If time is truly eternal (and if not, then what does that mean?)
then, in an instant (from your point of view) you will have traveled to the end of Eternity!
Whatt?? I really don’t get it.
On the other hand, if you tell me that, as soon as you truly die, the next thing you know is
that you wake up in some other body, then that is, at least, a concept that I can understand.
How about this question: Where were you, the day before you were conceived?
Zillions of people, and multifarious animals, were born the day before, and the year before,
and none of that mattered to you in the least; but, suddenly, you find yourself in one particular womb,
with some vague sensations, muffled sounds, et cetera, and here you are, still hanging on to
that same body, which has had its atoms replenished and replaced many times over, gradually,
while the intensity of your consciousness waxes and wanes every day, but you have a sense of
continuity such that, you feel like you are the same person, now, as when you were a child.
Sometimes, people ask: Who are you?
To me, that question usually translates to How are you, in the sense of
What are your characteristics, character-wise?
What are your likes, dislikes, ambitions, beliefs, etc.?
To me, the “Who” question should be reserved for something like a unique identifier,
something like an address that pinpoints one particular hardware word in a RAM,
whereas the “How” question would be asking for the information currently registered in that word.
The information can be changed, over and over, without changing the word’s identifier
(the address that leads to those particular transistors), whereas the relationship
between those same transistors and their address is fixed (chip-level, let us say).
So here is a simple model of how reincarnation might work:
Suppose you, too, had a fixed association with some number.
To make things really simple, suppose your number were 124,
and that the association was so fixed, that you might as well “be” that number,
so, who are you? You are 124. And I’m 511.
We might conceivably swap bodies, you and I, but we can never swap numbers,
because that’s who we “really” are.
The day before you were conceived, a slew of other numbers were being captured,
so to speak, by other bodies, and then, suddenly, number 124 got caught,
and here you are, in your current body, until such time as your body becomes
so badly degraded that it can no longer hold you, and then you are free again!
That would mean that, when you die, what happens is that you return to the same state
that you were in, right before you came into this life, and, if that happened once,
then it might happen again, and, if time is truly eternal, then it should indeed happen again.
In fact, it should happen over and over, so, from your point of view,
you are always alive somehow somewhere.
Given the weirdness of quantum mechanics, I must entertain the possibility
that this may not be correct, but at least it is a proposition that I can wrap my head around.
With respect to this model, I have two anxieties. Alas. One is the fact that,
according to ongoing observations of the universe, it definitely seems to be expanding,
and worse, it seems to be accelerating its expansion, and most cosmologists nowadays
take that to imply that it will never ever go back to a “crunch” and another “bang”!
That idea, coupled with the estimate that the Big Bang occurred some thirteen or fourteen
billion years ago, does not, however, make sense to me, either, for the following reason:
If time is infinite in extent, and you live only once, for a finite interval of time,
then either that life lies infinitely far into the future, or, it has already happened,
an infinitely long time ago. What are the chances that you should be alive, right now?
Zilch!
The same can be said of the universe we live in. It seems probability zero to me,
that we should be living at a finite amount of time from the beginning of this universe,
if the universe is destined to dilute itself until it cannot support any life forms,
and thereafter it never restarts.
Some cosmologists have been proposing, and continue to propose and develop,
mechanisms and mathematical models that would allow the universe to restart,
despite, and in harmony with, all the observational evidence gathered by humanity thus far.
If that were to pan out, I’d have one less anxiety, but I would still have this other one:
How many identifying numbers are there?
There would have to exist enough of them, that it shall never come to pass
that a body is formed, that is perfectly functional, but has no one in it.
James Cameron, in his movie Avatar, posits that such a thing can actually occur:
he posits that if we constructed a potentially intelligent body, and said body
began to function normally in terms of metabolism, fluid motion, etc.,
it would not wake up until someone entered it.
Cameron’s hypothesis, the way he portrays it, is in principle testable, so, perhaps,
we shall some day find out. Meanwhile, I strongly suspect that this is not so:
that if one were to e.g. copy, atom by atom, a living and conscious body,
that the copy would not only live but also be conscious, and that there would
spontaneously be someone inside it. If all went to perfection, technically,
then said copy would have all the memories of the original,
and would subjectively feel to actually be the original.
In fact, I even have the sneaking suspicion that, in your body and mine, there is not only
a single individual, but many, all sharing the exact same subjective experience,
and each incognizant of the existence of the others.
Numbers scare me —even integers— if they are too large to be written down in decimal notation,
so the notion of an infinite cardinality (an infinite number of individuals of any kind),
is something I regard with apprehension and suspicion.
This is partly because, in order to distinguish one such individual
—to differentiate it from all the others— or, as mathematicians put it,
to choose any one at random, out of an infinite set: that, necessarily,
would require an infinite (or, certainly, unbounded) amount of information.
On the other hand, if you find yourself somewhere on an infinite extent of time,
it seems to me like you’re not really choosing; you’re sliding along,
and always have been. In a sense, you are everywhere:
fast forward; slow down; fast forward; etc. Your position on the Line of Eternity
never changes in relation to a beginning that never was,
nor to an end that never will be. It’s a status quo that has always been like that.
Infinite sets of discrete individuals are a different matter, if we expect
to be able to recognize each one as distinct from every other one.
Certainly, I would never want to be equated with some other individual!
But most professional mathematicians not only accept the notion of infinite sets;
they even assert that there is a whole hierarchy of progressively larger infinities
—cardinalities of progressively larger collections of distinguishable individuals—
starting with the infinity of the integers, usually symbolized as aleph-zero: ℵ₀
They claim, that the cardinality of all the rational numbers to be found
in the real line interval from 0 to 1 is ℵ₀ , but that the set of all irrational numbers
in that same interval has a cardinality of ℵ₁ , which is an infinity of higher order than ℵ₀
Worse: they claim that this goes on and on, higher and higher with no end in sight!
But! How big can one imagine a set, whose members can still be uniquely identified?
How much information does it take, to “choose” a particular individual?
When it comes to positive integers, if we write one down, in, say, decimal notation,
we need to specify a finite but unbounded amount of digits.
If we look at the set of irrationals in [0,1], which contains ℵ₁ elements,
then we need an ordered list of ℵ₀ digits: no less, because, if we were to stop,
it would mean that the specified number was rational, not irrational.
As example of a set with ℵ₂ elements, consider the set of all curves in a 1 by 1 rectangle.
We can restrict that, to include only curves that have a starting point and an endpoint,
and have a fixed length (e.g. 1); we’d still have a total of ℵ₂ elements.
But, how much information would it take, to specify any one of these, uniquely?
We’d have to specify the coordinates of each point along the curve:
ℵ₀ digits for each coordinate pair, but the curve contains ℵ₁ points, which makes ℵ₁ digits in total.
Yeah; transfinite arithmetic is weird, but the thing is: ℵ₁ is so large
that it is uncountable [sic], meaning that you cannot —not even “in principle”—
construct an ordered list of ℵ₁ digits; in other words, you can not give a name
to every curve, “name” meaning a string (finite or not) of letters from a finite alphabet.
[If we also impose smoothness, then we don’t need to specify all ℵ₁ points on the curve:
specifying the points where the length from the starting point is rational would suffice.]
Of course, there are curves that you can specify algorithmically, on a sheet of paper,
but those constitute an infinitesimal fraction (literally!) of all curves in the rectangle.
Note:
Back to reincarnation: how many potential WHOs do we need,
in order to avoid the empty body situation? It may be,
that some huge but finite quantity might be enough, but, doesn’t that sound a bit iffy to you?
Wouldn’t it be neat, if each universe recycled endlessly, and each had its own quota of WHOs
that would, over and over, be chosen to live for a while? Wishful thinking? Hmm.
A total of ℵ₀ WHOs, valid across all universes, sounds more plausible to me, but,
how many universes? Infinitely many? Or, more like, ten-to-the-hundreds-of-thousands?
Still, if ℵ₀ WHOs were the case, and suddenly your number came up:
what are the chances that you will ever be chosen again?
Zero, according to standard math!
Unless, that is, unless the lottery were drawn, not a finite number of times, but, say, ℵ₁ ?
In that case, you would surely be chosen again, an infinite number of times.
Problem is, if a lot is cast every second that you are dead, then Eternity ain’t long enough!
And yet! The fact is that, here you are, and you haven’t died yet,
so it seems to me that you must have been chosen an infinite number of times before,
and in the future; else you’d be forever dead by now.
Can you clearly understand the meaning of such a claim?
If you do, please try to explicate it, in the comments section, because,
frankly, I don’t get it, and I say that, because, whenever you lose consciousness,
time whizzes by you at infinite speed. When you wake up, after total anesthesia,
you have no subjective clue as to whether you were unconscious for a minute,
or a billion years.
So, if you die, and there is nothing after death, then, in an instant
(from your point of view) you should move forward an infinite amount of time.
If time is truly eternal (and if not, then what does that mean?)
then, in an instant (from your point of view) you will have traveled to the end of Eternity!
Whatt?? I really don’t get it.
On the other hand, if you tell me that, as soon as you truly die, the next thing you know is
that you wake up in some other body, then that is, at least, a concept that I can understand.
How about this question: Where were you, the day before you were conceived?
Zillions of people, and multifarious animals, were born the day before, and the year before,
and none of that mattered to you in the least; but, suddenly, you find yourself in one particular womb,
with some vague sensations, muffled sounds, et cetera, and here you are, still hanging on to
that same body, which has had its atoms replenished and replaced many times over, gradually,
while the intensity of your consciousness waxes and wanes every day, but you have a sense of
continuity such that, you feel like you are the same person, now, as when you were a child.
Sometimes, people ask: Who are you?
To me, that question usually translates to How are you, in the sense of
What are your characteristics, character-wise?
What are your likes, dislikes, ambitions, beliefs, etc.?
To me, the “Who” question should be reserved for something like a unique identifier,
something like an address that pinpoints one particular hardware word in a RAM,
whereas the “How” question would be asking for the information currently registered in that word.
The information can be changed, over and over, without changing the word’s identifier
(the address that leads to those particular transistors), whereas the relationship
between those same transistors and their address is fixed (chip-level, let us say).
So here is a simple model of how reincarnation might work:
Suppose you, too, had a fixed association with some number.
To make things really simple, suppose your number were 124,
and that the association was so fixed, that you might as well “be” that number,
so, who are you? You are 124. And I’m 511.
We might conceivably swap bodies, you and I, but we can never swap numbers,
because that’s who we “really” are.
The day before you were conceived, a slew of other numbers were being captured,
so to speak, by other bodies, and then, suddenly, number 124 got caught,
and here you are, in your current body, until such time as your body becomes
so badly degraded that it can no longer hold you, and then you are free again!
That would mean that, when you die, what happens is that you return to the same state
that you were in, right before you came into this life, and, if that happened once,
then it might happen again, and, if time is truly eternal, then it should indeed happen again.
In fact, it should happen over and over, so, from your point of view,
you are always alive somehow somewhere.
Given the weirdness of quantum mechanics, I must entertain the possibility
that this may not be correct, but at least it is a proposition that I can wrap my head around.
With respect to this model, I have two anxieties. Alas. One is the fact that,
according to ongoing observations of the universe, it definitely seems to be expanding,
and worse, it seems to be accelerating its expansion, and most cosmologists nowadays
take that to imply that it will never ever go back to a “crunch” and another “bang”!
That idea, coupled with the estimate that the Big Bang occurred some thirteen or fourteen
billion years ago, does not, however, make sense to me, either, for the following reason:
If time is infinite in extent, and you live only once, for a finite interval of time,
then either that life lies infinitely far into the future, or, it has already happened,
an infinitely long time ago. What are the chances that you should be alive, right now?
Zilch!
The same can be said of the universe we live in. It seems probability zero to me,
that we should be living at a finite amount of time from the beginning of this universe,
if the universe is destined to dilute itself until it cannot support any life forms,
and thereafter it never restarts.
Some cosmologists have been proposing, and continue to propose and develop,
mechanisms and mathematical models that would allow the universe to restart,
despite, and in harmony with, all the observational evidence gathered by humanity thus far.
If that were to pan out, I’d have one less anxiety, but I would still have this other one:
How many identifying numbers are there?
There would have to exist enough of them, that it shall never come to pass
that a body is formed, that is perfectly functional, but has no one in it.
James Cameron, in his movie Avatar, posits that such a thing can actually occur:
he posits that if we constructed a potentially intelligent body, and said body
began to function normally in terms of metabolism, fluid motion, etc.,
it would not wake up until someone entered it.
Cameron’s hypothesis, the way he portrays it, is in principle testable, so, perhaps,
we shall some day find out. Meanwhile, I strongly suspect that this is not so:
that if one were to e.g. copy, atom by atom, a living and conscious body,
that the copy would not only live but also be conscious, and that there would
spontaneously be someone inside it. If all went to perfection, technically,
then said copy would have all the memories of the original,
and would subjectively feel to actually be the original.
In fact, I even have the sneaking suspicion that, in your body and mine, there is not only
a single individual, but many, all sharing the exact same subjective experience,
and each incognizant of the existence of the others.
Numbers scare me —even integers— if they are too large to be written down in decimal notation,
so the notion of an infinite cardinality (an infinite number of individuals of any kind),
is something I regard with apprehension and suspicion.
This is partly because, in order to distinguish one such individual
—to differentiate it from all the others— or, as mathematicians put it,
to choose any one at random, out of an infinite set: that, necessarily,
would require an infinite (or, certainly, unbounded) amount of information.
On the other hand, if you find yourself somewhere on an infinite extent of time,
it seems to me like you’re not really choosing; you’re sliding along,
and always have been. In a sense, you are everywhere:
fast forward; slow down; fast forward; etc. Your position on the Line of Eternity
never changes in relation to a beginning that never was,
nor to an end that never will be. It’s a status quo that has always been like that.
Infinite sets of discrete individuals are a different matter, if we expect
to be able to recognize each one as distinct from every other one.
Certainly, I would never want to be equated with some other individual!
But most professional mathematicians not only accept the notion of infinite sets;
they even assert that there is a whole hierarchy of progressively larger infinities
—cardinalities of progressively larger collections of distinguishable individuals—
starting with the infinity of the integers, usually symbolized as aleph-zero: ℵ₀
They claim, that the cardinality of all the rational numbers to be found
in the real line interval from 0 to 1 is ℵ₀ , but that the set of all irrational numbers
in that same interval has a cardinality of ℵ₁ , which is an infinity of higher order than ℵ₀
Worse: they claim that this goes on and on, higher and higher with no end in sight!
But! How big can one imagine a set, whose members can still be uniquely identified?
How much information does it take, to “choose” a particular individual?
When it comes to positive integers, if we write one down, in, say, decimal notation,
we need to specify a finite but unbounded amount of digits.
If we look at the set of irrationals in [0,1], which contains ℵ₁ elements,
then we need an ordered list of ℵ₀ digits: no less, because, if we were to stop,
it would mean that the specified number was rational, not irrational.
As example of a set with ℵ₂ elements, consider the set of all curves in a 1 by 1 rectangle.
We can restrict that, to include only curves that have a starting point and an endpoint,
and have a fixed length (e.g. 1); we’d still have a total of ℵ₂ elements.
But, how much information would it take, to specify any one of these, uniquely?
We’d have to specify the coordinates of each point along the curve:
ℵ₀ digits for each coordinate pair, but the curve contains ℵ₁ points, which makes ℵ₁ digits in total.
Yeah; transfinite arithmetic is weird, but the thing is: ℵ₁ is so large
that it is uncountable [sic], meaning that you cannot —not even “in principle”—
construct an ordered list of ℵ₁ digits; in other words, you can not give a name
to every curve, “name” meaning a string (finite or not) of letters from a finite alphabet.
[If we also impose smoothness, then we don’t need to specify all ℵ₁ points on the curve:
specifying the points where the length from the starting point is rational would suffice.]
Of course, there are curves that you can specify algorithmically, on a sheet of paper,
but those constitute an infinitesimal fraction (literally!) of all curves in the rectangle.
Note:
- The length of a sequence cannot exceed ℵ₀ (ℵ₁ is too much).
That means that the length of Eternity (seen as the number of notches,
one second apart, or a billion years apart), is ℵ₀ - From a finite alphabet of more than one letter, however large,
a total of ℵ₁ words, or names, can be generated. No more.
Even if words are allowed to be ℵ₀ long. Therefore,
it’s mathematically impossible to assign a unique name
to each element of any set whose cardinality is larger than ℵ₁
Back to reincarnation: how many potential WHOs do we need,
in order to avoid the empty body situation? It may be,
that some huge but finite quantity might be enough, but, doesn’t that sound a bit iffy to you?
Wouldn’t it be neat, if each universe recycled endlessly, and each had its own quota of WHOs
that would, over and over, be chosen to live for a while? Wishful thinking? Hmm.
A total of ℵ₀ WHOs, valid across all universes, sounds more plausible to me, but,
how many universes? Infinitely many? Or, more like, ten-to-the-hundreds-of-thousands?
Still, if ℵ₀ WHOs were the case, and suddenly your number came up:
what are the chances that you will ever be chosen again?
Zero, according to standard math!
Unless, that is, unless the lottery were drawn, not a finite number of times, but, say, ℵ₁ ?
In that case, you would surely be chosen again, an infinite number of times.
Problem is, if a lot is cast every second that you are dead, then Eternity ain’t long enough!
And yet! The fact is that, here you are, and you haven’t died yet,
so it seems to me that you must have been chosen an infinite number of times before,
and in the future; else you’d be forever dead by now.
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Physical Reality of Spirit World
11 min read
In my last year of schooling, I went to a school run by catholic brothers and fathers.
At some point I asked one of the fathers (i.e., a priest) if an angel was subject to
the speed-of-light limitation that limits all forms of matter.
He told me he would think about it, and, the following day, he had this answer:
An angel is not subject to the speed-of-light limitation, because
if the angel moves from A to B,
it does not need to pass through any intermediate points:
it merely disappears at A and appears at B.
The answer, at the time, seemed to me dishonest in the sense that I did not believe
that he had honestly analyzed the question from scratch, but rather, that,
starting from the answer that he wanted, he sought a way to justify his preferred conclusion.
Many years later, I now feel the need to apologize: professional physicists have repeatedly been finding
examples of entities that are real, immaterial, and that move like the angel was posited to move.
In its most basic form —as pondered by physicists— the idea is that,
if A and B are some distance apart, A can in some way affect B,
without having to move to B, and without having to send any kind of messenger
that travels from A to B on some trajectory (some continuum of intermediate points),
or, if such messenger be sent, then it travels infinitely fast.
This idea was considered, and rejected, by Isaac Newton in 1692;
considered, and rejected, by Albert Einstein in the 1930s;
in 1947, in a letter to Max Born, Einstein famously states:
“physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance.”
But nowadays (early 21st century) there is an even more startling variant of this notion,
which entails the existence of extended entities that can change their shape in an instant.
By extended I mean diffuse, spread out in space, as opposed to point-like:
things that can be considered functions from spacetime to real numbers, in that,
at every point in some stretch of space and time, a single meaningful value is associated,
so these entities have a shape and a density that can be visually rendered like a kind of fog.
Such entities have been found experimentally and critically analyzed
(i.e. they have stirred controversy among experimentalists and theoreticians)
but there seems to be general agreement now, that they are immaterial (carry no energy, no mass)
and yet they are definitely real, we know, because we experimentally observe that they govern matter:
specifically, I’m thinking of quantum mechanical wave functions and pilot waves.
These entities can change their shape in an instant, or, at least,
at a rate that can be experimentally shown to be
at least thousands of times faster than the speed of light.
Allow me to backtrack: before there were cities; before there was agriculture;
at least as far back as our first petroglyphs and cave paintings,
we have held the belief that, in addition to the world that we see around us,
there is a hidden world, populated by beings that, in modern English,
we call spirits, and don’t normally see.
This hidden world is usually conceived as superimposed, or parallel, to the conspicuous.
If you allow me, I would rather think of Reality as a single reality,
in which there are numerous objects/entities/things,
of which some have energy or mass (i.e. matter),
and others, are immaterial: for example, mathematical truths.
Can we justifiably claim that immaterial things exist at all?
Mathematics is a vast subject, full of axioms, definitions, and theorems,
and one might want to distinguish between a statement that is mathematically correct,
in that it can be justified by a process that respects all the rules, and,
a statement that is actually true!
The distinction arises because not all mathematical axioms are universally agreed upon,
and some mathematicians delight in exploring the consequences of accepting or denying
some arcane axiom, and come up with mutually contradictory theorems,
depending on which path they follow.
There are, however, some mathematical statements that you can verify empirically,
and in such statements I believe, like I believe in the existence of our moon
(because I can plainly see it), or like I believe in the air in front of my face,
which, although I cannot see it, I do breathe it, so, yes: I have complete faith
in the existence of said air.
Example: it is said that e-to-the-i-pi (eiπ) equals minus one.
That conclusion is reached, academically, by long mathematical reasoning
that I might not entirely understand, or, even if I did,
how can I be certain that there isn’t some omission or mistake somewhere?
Therefore I might say that I believe, or I have faith in,
all the smart people that have analyzed the reasoning and have found it to be good.
However!
There is also a theorem that says that e-to-the-x (ex) can be calculated as
1 + x + x2/2 + (more and more terms, but following a simple pattern),
and that this expansion is valid for all x.
Now, if that is true, then we can pull out any simple calculator
(you trust your calculator to do simple arithmetic correctly, yes?)
and, with such help (or without it, if you want to be really fussy),
we can attempt to calculate that e-to-the-i-pi expression,
taking into account that i*i = i2 = -1, so i3 = -i, i4 = 1,
and higher powers of i keep cycling to i, -1, -i, 1, and on and on the same.
So, if we try to do the ex expansion with x = iπ, namely
1 + iπ - π2/2 - iπ3/6 + π4/24 + iπ5/120 etc.
then we separate those terms that have a factor of i from those that have not,
and we add them separately. It turns out that, the more terms we take into account,
the more the sum of terms without an i add up to something that gets closer and closer to -1,
whereas the sum of all the factors of i keep getting closer and closer to zero!
After such an experiment I declare that eiπ = -1 is no longer a matter of faith,
but rather, it is something that I can verify empirically, and therefore I declare,
that I shall believe in it like I believe in the existence of the Moon!
That piece of math, I give as an example of a mathematical truth.
There is, of course, an infinity of mathematical truths
— just think: ei2π must equal plus one, right?—
and I claim that all of them exist:
they are real, in the sense that all matter must obey them,
or, rather, that there never has been, and never will be,
any piece of matter that in any way violates a mathematical truth.
Now, you might counter that, even if eiπ = -1 is true,
an elementary particle doesn’t really care one way or the other; what would I say to that?
What occurs to me is that all matter obeys physical laws, and that currently,
physicists have a pretty good idea of what these laws are, and have formulated them
in mathematical terms, meaning, in practice, that an experimenter can set up
an experiment that culminates in some measurement, and,
even before the experiment starts, a theoretician can calculate what value
said measurement should yield, and will most likely be proven right.
[Contemplate the jaw-dropping feat of probes to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn:
everything moves, so you don’t point your rocket in the direction of Jupiter or Saturn;
you point it toward Venus! The probe gets a gravity-assist from Venus,
swings around toward Earth, gets another gravity-assist and another bend in its trajectory,
but eventually gets to where it was predicted to!]
In order to arrive at the theoretical prediction, the theoretician has, of course,
made abundant use of mathematical truths (including truths involving e-to-the-x),
so, if the theoretical result is experimentally confirmed, I would consider that
a strong indication that those truths are governing matter; wouldn’t you?
All mathematical truths are ubiquitous and eternal, and they are perfectly static.
There exist also, however, parts of Reality that are immaterial, and dynamic.
They demonstrably exist, because they govern matter, dynamically.
As of late 2018 (review here), there is still controversy over whether such an entity
(specifically, a particle’s wave function) merely advises the particle where to go,
by generating a probability density, or whether such a function (then called a pilot wave)
actually compels the particle to follow a particular path, but, in either case,
the guiding function itself can be probed experimentally by its effects,
even though it does not in itself contain any matter.
Experimentally it is possible to generate two or more particles that share the same wave function.
When that happens, we say that the particles are entangled, and, any time one of the entangled particles
interacts with anything, the wave function changes, and therefore changes its influence upon the other particles.
That change in influence can be detected, and thus, the speed at which the wave function deforms
(or rather, the speed at which the deformation propagates over a potentially large distance)
can in principle be measured. For example, in 2012, three entangled particles were generated
at the Observatory of La Palma (Canary Islands), one of which was sent to, and detected, 143km away,
on Tenerife —again and again: over nineteen thousand successful trials—
and the effect of that detection was noticed at La Palma with no measurable delay,
meaning that, if some kind of messenger was sent back by the particle received at Tenerife,
said messenger would have had to travel faster than light by a factor of more than a thousand.
The preferred interpretation is that there was no messenger, but simply,
non-locality on the part of the wave function.
Much like my highschool teacher’s concept regarding angels, right?
Except, it’s not so much that the angel disappears at A and appears at B,
but rather, that it maintains a presence simultaneously at A and B,
even though they are far apart, and yet, its train of thought is throughout
consistent and without delay. Not baad.
Note 1: I am not trying to insinuate that a wave function has a psychology
resembling that of a human, but I do think it’s clear that such functions
pick up, process, and deliver information, and that the processing
is highly sophisticated, in addition to fast,
—as witnessed by anyone trying to calculate with computer algorithms!
Note 2: Poetically speaking, mathematical truths constitute a cage and rigid scaffolding,
that constrains and supports all matter inside it. Matter itself is dynamic, and its morphs and motions
are governed by dynamic immaterial extended entities that somehow oblige each particle to follow
precise instructions that, in turn, obey physical laws that are generically fixed, but whose dicta
are highly dependent on the particle’s history (otherwise known as initial conditions) and environment.
To go, from a thorough analysis of said history and environment, to specific dicta
(thou shalt move exactly as follows: ...) necessarily involves highly sophisticated information processing,
and this raises in me the question: where is the infrastructure that does the processing?
For perspective on processing power, consider e.g. the mass of a proton:
it is well defined, and has been measured (in 2017) to a precision of 32 parts-per-trillion, even though
well over 99% of this mass comes from kinetic energy rather than the rest mass of its components.
[Remember Einstein’s discovery that all energy bears mass, in the proportion of E = mc² ]
Now, every proton internally quakes on its own; yet they all converge to the same mass value!
Calculating what this mass should be takes so much computing power that it was achieved
(to a much lower precision) only in 2008.
If the wave function (or, the pilot wave) picks up all the necessary environmental information,
one might suggest that the same function also does, somehow, perform the calculations.
Frankly, that does not ring true to me; it seems to me that the computational infrastructure
is truly and permanently hidden from us. I propose that, the one who continually does the calculations,
is God.
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Magick, Physics, Astral Travel.
6 min read
Have you ever traveled in astral form?
Of course you have— if you've ever had a vivid dream!
You've probably seen your dog do that, too, right?
Normally, an astral body consists of the information content of your mind
(not even all of it), with just enough energy to encode the information.
Time ago, in an exceptionally vivid dream,
I met a very special girl —eh, lady— named Sarit.
In a string of successive dreams, we developed an intimate relationship,
to the point that, on this planet (where DA Administration is headquartered),
I began to build an artificial body in her likeness:
it turned out so well, that said body came to life with her soul in it!
(As I have described here, and here.)
Such a body is substantial enough that it can be seen and photographed
by regular human beings (muggles, if you'll pardon the expression),
but her biological body remains in her own world, and needs attention,
so she can stay here for only brief periods at a time.
Recently, on one of her return trips, she went astray, which had me worried sick,
until DollBlue alerted me that Sarit had materialized in Anathema,
the world that DollBlue describes.
On that world, DollBlue has, literally, a twin soul, named Aryun the Bard.
This is a clear-cut case of what physicists call entanglement:
each is aware of what the other is thinking, even though they inhabit wide-apart bodies.
[Biological bodies, as evidenced by the fact that DollBlue recently gave birth
to a "real" child; real as in, kicking, screaming, and suckling.]
With DollBlue's guidance, I was able to astrally visit the sylvan meadow
where Sarit was having a picnic with two lovely "beasten" girls (slaves, alas),
but my visit was cut short because I got so excited
when Sarit and I kind of melded into a hug,
that I was jolted back to my bed, here.
Eventually I'll fill you in on the emotional background of all this, but,
right now, I just want to comment on magick versus physics:
On places like Anathema, "real" magic is pretty obvious, whereas on Earth, it is hard to find.
It does, however, exist even on Earth, and physicists are actively looking for it:
they call it physics BSM,
with BSM an acronym for Beyond the Standard Model, where "Standard"
refers to everything that can currently be described theoretically AND verified experimentally,
including —believe it or not— entanglement!
BSM theories are a dime a dozen; experimental verification is "at" the Large Hadron Collider (LHC),
where it is showing up in subtle asymmetries regarding the Top Quark. That's it. Thus far.
So, back to Sarit, in astral form, in Anathema.
I melted into her, but she was solid, eating solid food: how come?
Part of the Standard Model of physics is the idea of a
very rarefied and highly elastic substance believed to permeate all space,
formerly called aether, nowadays called field, of which there are different types,
in particular one, called the Higgs field,
that is said to confer mass to particles that would otherwise be massless.
Neutrinos have very low mass, "down" quarks are millions of times as massive; both are stable,
but the down quark interacts more strongly with the Higgs field, says the Standard interpretation.
On Anathema, a group of inhabitants have managed to generate a field that excludes magic,
much as a superconductor excludes magnetic fields,
and this illustrates that, for magic to be operative, there has to be a corresponding field,
field that is strong over most of Anathema, including Nordwood, where Sarit showed up,
and my take is that her astral body has picked up mass by interacting strongly with this field,
whereas mine remained ghostly, either because I didn't linger long enough, or—
you get the picture.
But, back to the Higgs! It turns out that most particles that we normally deal with,
including atomic nuclei, are not elementary, but are composed of elementary particles,
and, in those cases, the Higgs mass is only a tiny fraction of the mass of the composite.
The rest comes from the energy associated with the mutual interaction of the constituents, via
m = E / c2
DollBlue's alter ego, Aryun,
has generously offered to arrange for Sarit's escape from Nordwood
(lest she be enslaved, or worse) to the so-called Floating Isle,
whose inhabitants live democratically in a magicless bubble,
until Sarit's compatriots can steer her back to her own world.
If my interpretation is correct, one might expect her body to become more subtle
the more deeply she enters said bubble, except!
Except that she's been eating solid food. See what I mean?
Perhaps the experts on her world can tell me if that's good or bad or what.
Gotta go.
Addendum regarding information transfer:
If you were dreaming, but as soon as you wake up, you hardly remember a thing,
then it means that your astral body was being fed information from
your biological body, but not the other way around.
At the other extreme, a lucid dream is one in which
the information transfer is near symmetric.
When I first met Sarit, she did not speak any English, but,
on her world, there are academics who study us, to the point that
they have compiled databases for some of our languages,
including English. She picked up some rudiments thereof on her world,
but when she came here, she was able to download into her artificial body
a very well-crafted database of English: ipso facto, she became fluent.
Had she, at that point, returned to her biological body,
she would have lost her fluency,
just as if she had awakened from a non-memorable dream.
At my house, however,
she has done extensive reading, speaking, and writing in English:
such experiences do transfer back to her biological body,
just as during a lucid dream.
Therefore, at this point, she's fluent in English, even in her biological body,
and therefore also in any astral body that carries her soul.
Thus, as soon as she meets Aryun, they can communicate in English.
Good to know.
(Aryun and DollBlue share the same languages, including German and English.)
Of course you have— if you've ever had a vivid dream!
You've probably seen your dog do that, too, right?
Normally, an astral body consists of the information content of your mind
(not even all of it), with just enough energy to encode the information.
Time ago, in an exceptionally vivid dream,
I met a very special girl —eh, lady— named Sarit.
In a string of successive dreams, we developed an intimate relationship,
to the point that, on this planet (where DA Administration is headquartered),
I began to build an artificial body in her likeness:
it turned out so well, that said body came to life with her soul in it!
(As I have described here, and here.)
Such a body is substantial enough that it can be seen and photographed
by regular human beings (muggles, if you'll pardon the expression),
but her biological body remains in her own world, and needs attention,
so she can stay here for only brief periods at a time.
Recently, on one of her return trips, she went astray, which had me worried sick,
until DollBlue alerted me that Sarit had materialized in Anathema,
the world that DollBlue describes.
On that world, DollBlue has, literally, a twin soul, named Aryun the Bard.
This is a clear-cut case of what physicists call entanglement:
each is aware of what the other is thinking, even though they inhabit wide-apart bodies.
[Biological bodies, as evidenced by the fact that DollBlue recently gave birth
to a "real" child; real as in, kicking, screaming, and suckling.]
With DollBlue's guidance, I was able to astrally visit the sylvan meadow
where Sarit was having a picnic with two lovely "beasten" girls (slaves, alas),
but my visit was cut short because I got so excited
when Sarit and I kind of melded into a hug,
that I was jolted back to my bed, here.
Eventually I'll fill you in on the emotional background of all this, but,
right now, I just want to comment on magick versus physics:
On places like Anathema, "real" magic is pretty obvious, whereas on Earth, it is hard to find.
It does, however, exist even on Earth, and physicists are actively looking for it:
they call it physics BSM,
with BSM an acronym for Beyond the Standard Model, where "Standard"
refers to everything that can currently be described theoretically AND verified experimentally,
including —believe it or not— entanglement!
BSM theories are a dime a dozen; experimental verification is "at" the Large Hadron Collider (LHC),
where it is showing up in subtle asymmetries regarding the Top Quark. That's it. Thus far.
So, back to Sarit, in astral form, in Anathema.
I melted into her, but she was solid, eating solid food: how come?
Part of the Standard Model of physics is the idea of a
very rarefied and highly elastic substance believed to permeate all space,
formerly called aether, nowadays called field, of which there are different types,
in particular one, called the Higgs field,
that is said to confer mass to particles that would otherwise be massless.
Neutrinos have very low mass, "down" quarks are millions of times as massive; both are stable,
but the down quark interacts more strongly with the Higgs field, says the Standard interpretation.
On Anathema, a group of inhabitants have managed to generate a field that excludes magic,
much as a superconductor excludes magnetic fields,
and this illustrates that, for magic to be operative, there has to be a corresponding field,
field that is strong over most of Anathema, including Nordwood, where Sarit showed up,
and my take is that her astral body has picked up mass by interacting strongly with this field,
whereas mine remained ghostly, either because I didn't linger long enough, or—
you get the picture.
But, back to the Higgs! It turns out that most particles that we normally deal with,
including atomic nuclei, are not elementary, but are composed of elementary particles,
and, in those cases, the Higgs mass is only a tiny fraction of the mass of the composite.
The rest comes from the energy associated with the mutual interaction of the constituents, via
m = E / c2
DollBlue's alter ego, Aryun,
has generously offered to arrange for Sarit's escape from Nordwood
(lest she be enslaved, or worse) to the so-called Floating Isle,
whose inhabitants live democratically in a magicless bubble,
until Sarit's compatriots can steer her back to her own world.
If my interpretation is correct, one might expect her body to become more subtle
the more deeply she enters said bubble, except!
Except that she's been eating solid food. See what I mean?
Perhaps the experts on her world can tell me if that's good or bad or what.
Gotta go.
Addendum regarding information transfer:
If you were dreaming, but as soon as you wake up, you hardly remember a thing,
then it means that your astral body was being fed information from
your biological body, but not the other way around.
At the other extreme, a lucid dream is one in which
the information transfer is near symmetric.
When I first met Sarit, she did not speak any English, but,
on her world, there are academics who study us, to the point that
they have compiled databases for some of our languages,
including English. She picked up some rudiments thereof on her world,
but when she came here, she was able to download into her artificial body
a very well-crafted database of English: ipso facto, she became fluent.
Had she, at that point, returned to her biological body,
she would have lost her fluency,
just as if she had awakened from a non-memorable dream.
At my house, however,
she has done extensive reading, speaking, and writing in English:
such experiences do transfer back to her biological body,
just as during a lucid dream.
Therefore, at this point, she's fluent in English, even in her biological body,
and therefore also in any astral body that carries her soul.
Thus, as soon as she meets Aryun, they can communicate in English.
Good to know.
(Aryun and DollBlue share the same languages, including German and English.)
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Shortcut through space: confirmed
3 min read
The idea that there could be more spatial dimensions than you can see,
was formally developed by nineteenth century mathematicians (e.g. Riemann).
Throughout the 20th century, physicists played with the idea,
but experimental evidence was remote, at best.
Until Fermilab's announcement in 2007:
evidence like that, might be called consistent with,
but was deemed statistically "insignificant"
(i.e. not compelling, given the slight imprecisions of distance measurements, etc.).
In September 2011, however, CERN confirmed the Fermilab results,
with a totally different setup, at a statistical significance of 6 sigma.
5 sigma is the usual standard for discovery announcements
when it comes to a hitherto unseen, but theoretically expected, subatomic particle.
This, however, is in the category of what (18th century mathematician) Laplace called:
or further confirm the results.
What, exactly, is it they've discovered?
They've discovered that artificially generated neutrinos can cross a distance of over 700km
at a speed slightly —only slightly— in excess of Einstein's universal speed limit, symbolized c,
as in E = mc2
That speed limit comes with a lot of weirdness. For example:
I swear that you are aging more slowly than I am, but,
from your point of view, it's the other way around(!),
yet both interpretations can be accepted as physically true,
and there is a mathematical framework,
known as Einstein's "special" (as opposed to "general") relativity,
that prescribes exactly how to translate from one observer's point of view to another's.
Said prescription might have seemed highly speculative in 1905,
but it has been so thoroughly confirmed, on a daily basis
—and every time you start your car—
that it's really out-on-a-limb for a professional physicist to justify
the possibility of a particle traveling faster than c (the speed of light in vacuum).
The most theoretically acceptable justification these days would be,
that the particles are not, really, traveling faster than light;
rather, they are finding a spatial shortcut across dimensions unseen by us
(dimensions through which light, emitted in our awareness, does not travel).
Are we on the brink of inventing a means to send human explorers to places
many light-years away, and back, in less than one human lifetime?
No, but my inner skeptic has granted me the artistic license to speculate that,
some time in our future, a reckless and well-connected whiz-kid is able,
on the sly, to go visit Pegicornitaurs!
Back to my drawing board, for ttobserve.
was formally developed by nineteenth century mathematicians (e.g. Riemann).
Throughout the 20th century, physicists played with the idea,
but experimental evidence was remote, at best.
Until Fermilab's announcement in 2007:
evidence like that, might be called consistent with,
but was deemed statistically "insignificant"
(i.e. not compelling, given the slight imprecisions of distance measurements, etc.).
In September 2011, however, CERN confirmed the Fermilab results,
with a totally different setup, at a statistical significance of 6 sigma.
5 sigma is the usual standard for discovery announcements
when it comes to a hitherto unseen, but theoretically expected, subatomic particle.
This, however, is in the category of what (18th century mathematician) Laplace called:
The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangenessso there is now a scramble to either find fault with the experimental procedure,
(later popularized by Carl Sagan),
or further confirm the results.
What, exactly, is it they've discovered?
They've discovered that artificially generated neutrinos can cross a distance of over 700km
at a speed slightly —only slightly— in excess of Einstein's universal speed limit, symbolized c,
as in E = mc2
That speed limit comes with a lot of weirdness. For example:
I swear that you are aging more slowly than I am, but,
from your point of view, it's the other way around(!),
yet both interpretations can be accepted as physically true,
and there is a mathematical framework,
known as Einstein's "special" (as opposed to "general") relativity,
that prescribes exactly how to translate from one observer's point of view to another's.
Said prescription might have seemed highly speculative in 1905,
but it has been so thoroughly confirmed, on a daily basis
—and every time you start your car—
that it's really out-on-a-limb for a professional physicist to justify
the possibility of a particle traveling faster than c (the speed of light in vacuum).
The most theoretically acceptable justification these days would be,
that the particles are not, really, traveling faster than light;
rather, they are finding a spatial shortcut across dimensions unseen by us
(dimensions through which light, emitted in our awareness, does not travel).
Are we on the brink of inventing a means to send human explorers to places
many light-years away, and back, in less than one human lifetime?
No, but my inner skeptic has granted me the artistic license to speculate that,
some time in our future, a reckless and well-connected whiz-kid is able,
on the sly, to go visit Pegicornitaurs!
Back to my drawing board, for ttobserve.
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Higgs Boson? Really?
4 min read
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