Thanks LibWhacker.
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Posted on 09/29/2014 4:34:42 PM PDT by LibWhacker
In the same universe where I married Mariska Hargitay.
CC
Ping for me.
I would love to have a big poster of that cat!
What I find most interesting about Quantum, is that it has implications of resolving religious debates that have been going on since the formation of the bible.
Specifically, I am speaking about the concept of determinism in the spiritual context. I.E. can a creation (Man) every truly have free will? Can the Creator know something is going to happen in the future, that he does not directly cause to happen?
In our deterministic, cause and effect universe, the answer is no. But it turns out that the universe is not *exactly* cause and effect. It seems we change the very nature (state) of the universe *simply* by being there and observing.
Does God have a sense of humor or what?
The carrot is attached to a stick attached to the Donkey. This approach can not bring us nearer, except to continue to teach us that the approach is in itself an error.
It is not that that knowledge is bad, or that the universe is 'unknowable'. It's that knowledge is an attribute, and the 'reality' has no attributes.
Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form.
The reason 2 + 2 always is 4, is because math is a property of the mind, not of the external universe.
The reason particles behave as waves and waves as particles is that they are neither. There is no 'they' there. They are attributes of the mind.
It is not that nothing is real. It is that it's nature is created by the mind alone. In itself, reality has no attributes.
I could go on with this forever. There is no such thing as time - only circumstantial evidence. There is no such thing as distance, or space. There are no things.
You can't even say there are 'no things' because there are no things for there to be none. There is no space in which they don't exist. No time for them to span.
No things are lacking. No space is lacking. No time is lacking.
The realization that things only appear when they are observed ... this is why when you observie the bridge, it can be observed that it is made of two halves. Only then does it have 2 halves. Only when two halves make a whole, do they make the whole.
Reality is itself a tautology.
A Zen master one put it this way 'it is only, it is.'
As soon as you assign it an attribute, you have already lost it.
As soon as it appears, all you can know is that 'that' isn't it.
No change, but no stillness not changing.
Even that there is mind making all this is a lie.
In the end, if there were such a thing, at the basis of Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism - the original intention of the teachings - which have been battered a million times by a million crude thoughts and men, even in their purest form - recognized these things. They recognized that all words are lies, but that to find your way out of a field of dung, you can only stack dung to mark a path out.
Christianity spoke of 'The World' as the illusion. Another realm as the more 'real' reality. I've yet to meet a Christian who knows that this other realm has no attributes.
The Buddha spoke of no arising, sustaining, perishing. Even no arising of illusion. No Buddha nature even. No Enlightenment, nothing to attain, yet no attainment lacking, no lack of Enlightenment.
The space between and amongst the reality we believe we 'know' (I believe Jesus said Heaven is already within us, around us, amongst us, I know the Buddha often spoke of '... you are already enlightened.' Hindus, if you say 'I finally realized - I am God!' will say 'you fool - you only now just understood that?' ... )
Knowledge of the world, like knowledge of how to properly hit a baseball, is not even in the same universe as hitting a baseball. That of course is merely an analogy. There is no bat with which to hit, no baseball to hit, no time in which to hit, no space for the ball to travel, never was a home run hit, ever, now, or will be in the future - no past, no present for them to occur.
In the meantime, the study of the attributes of the mind, which is what Newton and Einstein and the Quantum Physicists were actually engaged in, are great fun, entirely useful and beneficial, but in a universe that has no uses, bestows no benefits, with no one to benefit. What they do teach ultimately is that the world is unknowable by the mind.
But it is knowable. That Heaven is already amongst us. That we are already enlightened, That you are and always were God ... all this hypnosis that the objects we observe are external phenomena (or internal phenomena), it is a wonderful dream ... but it is only a dream. Physics occurs within this dream of an 'extern' and 'internal' universe.
Reality is real, as reality, but "it" has no attributes. Sometimes we make it a wave, sometimes a particle. It only appears when observed. What is ever there at all, before you looked? Between when you looked, and next looked?
Is 'there' even a 'there'? There is not 'there' for 'there' to take place.
It's a lie to say 'it's not' ... because there is no 'not there' there either.
So you have to stop thinking that 2 + 2 is 4. No 2, no plus, so no 4. No beginning, no ending, no attainment, nothing to attain.
In the meantime, I love this stuff, the reality behind it is totally amazing. I don't think I'm smarter than them, I am merely less complex. I am just firmly confident that the carrot is attached to the donkey. Reality, as we call it, is a tautology, and a tautology can never be caught up with (dangling participle.) But even the Tautology can teach us the nature of the real 'reality' which is of course defined only by it's complete lack of attributes, even as it is lacking in nothing., has no attributes not to have.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
It seems to me the physicists drastically departed from science and into philosophy. Many of their questions sound like the musings of a bunch of college freshmen in a pot fueled bull session.
They discuss how people should theoretically live their lives based on the implications of the latest quantum theory?
I can’t do the math but I think Einstein was right.
Bookmark.
Right in reading about Einstein I think he saw this as all reducible to simple explanations and nuts and bolts.
Give all this information to Barack Obama and he'll figure it out in 30 minutes. Of course then he'll spend the next 6 months trying to decide whether to tell anyone what the solution is.
There is an anecdote where Einstein was with colleagues and one expressed a theory about how “God” arranged the universe. Einstein spoke up and shot the theory down. His colleague said but Einstein that is exactly the theory you put forward in a recent paper. And Einstein answered, how can I insist that the Good Lord conform to my papers?
I think it was Bohr who then muttered “yes yes, for Einstein anything is allowed”.
Marker for coffee in the AM
Explain how then it is that all humans see things the same. When confronted with a bridge, I see a bridge. So does the guy next to me, and the next guy and the next gal (just to not be sexist here). Why are we all perceiving the same existential dream? How are animals perceiving the world? How about inanimate objects, like rocks. What is a rock’s universe? If the rock is not actually appearing until the split second we “make” it appear in some fashion, why do we all “see” the rock in the same way? Is a rock animate or inanimate? Inquiring minds want to know. Well, mine does, at least.
If there were such a thing as time and space, let’s take the rock. Take a small hammer, and bring it down, not all that hard, against the rock. A few small fragments and some dust flies off.
Continue this all day. At some point, you have gravel, shards, dust.
Which hit, exactly, caused the rock to no longer be a rock? At which point did it’s nature as a ‘rock’ cease?
It was never a rock, never possessed any essence of a rock.
Sometime between now and 1000 years, again, assuming time, that bridge may no longer be there. At which instant, exactly, did it cease to be a bridge? It didn’t cease to be a bridge, it never was a bridge, was never possessed of the essence of being a bridge. Never having been a bridge, nor was it ever lacking bridge-ness.
This is the nature of the mind. It separates, and by doing so, creates. And that is unproblematic, as long as you don’t believe it.
That is only a starting point for beginning to have a sane vision of reality.
No bridge ever arose, no bridge ever existed for a time, no bridge ever ceased. This is true of all the constituents of the so called bridge, and the constituents of the constituents. Remove them a piece at a time - at what point does the guy next to you, and next to him, and the gal, all say ‘that is no longer a bridge’? No longer a rock?
This is only a crude example. But the appearances of these things, 100 men may say ‘that is a bridge.’ But it is also true that a billion dew drops on the trees surrounding the bridge in the morning, appear also to reflect something with similar attributes as the bridge, that is, if you observed the so called ‘dew drops’, and didn’t ask yourself ‘at which point, exactly, did they cease being a bunch of little steam-lets and assume the essence of ‘drop.’
All reality is transparent to this, does not hold up. Jesus called it ‘The World.’ The Buddha called it many things too - the Wheel of Rebirth - of appearances.
The discomfort you feel is the mind fighting for dominance. I can guarantee you that you are not your mind. But I hesitate to paint you with any man-made religious agreement.
It is enough to know that this ‘World’ in which we seem to find ourselves, is not what is really going on. It is all mind stuff.
You experience the world on a regular basis as it really is, outside the mind, but you don’t remember it. That is the trick of the tautology of the mind. Within the context of the mind, you think everything you can think of is the total extent of your experience, that your memory actually correlates to something, and while you can only seemingly hold a few things in your mind at a time, you have this sense that if you go check on the myriad other things, they will be there. This is the assumption under which the story portion of your life unfolds - what you tell yourself, and fully believe ‘has happened.’
That is also the trap. If you continue to demand that the bridge is a bridge, that the rock is a rock, you are free to do that, and most of humanity will line up behind you and against what I am telling you.
All I am telling you is that, if such men as Jesus, The Buddha, and many many others, if we are to assume they grasped something, cautioned humanity not to take the ‘World’ that appears and disappears, seemingly in time and space, as anything substantial.
Eternity never meant ‘for all time.’ It means, there is ‘no such thing as time.’
The mind hates this! The mind is a wonderful thing. But it is not happy about accepting that its creations have no corresponding objects in reality, anywhere, ever. Even its creations while real, are not of the nature or attributes we ascribe them.
It is like a criminal, appearing in court, as a character witness for himself, proving his existence, and also as judge and jury in the trial. Of course he is acquitted of being a con man. This is the nature of the tautology, and the trap, of the mind. Quantum Physics is the study of how the mind spins an illusion. The illusion is always there, seemingly whenever we look. Every single time. Having created it, without remembering we created it, we take it as a priori ‘existence,’ and take it as an assumption.
I’ve often wondered if a good deal of the confusion surrounding the science wasn’t intentionally placed in the literature as an intellectual hurdle, since its grasp too easily could make nuclear warfare a less controllable endeavor.
Interesting.
Read it twice, about 15 years apart - helped me grasp the basics without the heavy math.
These discussions always bring me back to Saul of Tarsus:
"Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known."
I Corinthians 13:12
btt
He had the right stuff, and was one of the nicer and more reasonable physicists. Many are overly belligerent, which has pushed talent out of the field. A recent article Einstein might have liked offers a less magical explanation for many quantum effects: Fluid Tests Hint at Concrete Quantum Reality
LOL! You are right.
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