Engage in the thought experiment that you are/were/will be every human for a sec. Is self-harm morally ok? Many would say yes. So "the egg" already gives those people a pass to hurt everyone else in this world because it's a form of self-harm. Great. Now for those who explicitly don't want to self-harm. "The egg" implies that your rebirths happen serially in meta-time. You live this life, then the next, then another,... those lives may overlap on earth, but in egg-time, they don't. This means you can statistically expect you've already lived 50% of them. There's no guarantee of this, but the distribution is normal, not uniform [1] (similar reasoning found in doomsday argument [2]). 50%, give or take, humans out there you've already been. Everything you do to them, you do to your PAST self. You're not only absolved of moral accountability, but also of the physical consequences of treating them horribly. So while "the egg" tries to do the opposite, it really seems to justify psycho maxxing.
Assuming the premise of the short story is true, of course. Otherwise, what's the point. I can't simultaneously grant the premise and pretend that I didn't just grant it, by denying my knowledge of the rebirth mechanism.
It is the hypothesis that all observers are actually manifestations of a single observer experiencing all of time, space, and every point of view. All world lines across spacetime are parts of one single line "like a huge tangled knot" traced out by the one observer.
Christianity (Catholicism) derived this as well. John Scotus Eriugena in the 800s.
Apocatastasis
The thesis goes something like: God is timeless. Time is necessary for change. In order to experience change, God creates universes that have time and descends into these lower states of existence. This gives rise to conscious beings - they’re literally small disconnected slices of God that descended to our state of existence. When you die, you “roll up” back into God taking your lived experience with you.
He was posthumously condemned in 1225 with an order for his books to be burned.
I'm no theologian but I don't really think this coheres with standard Catholic doctrine. Typically, we say that God is being itself, pure and uncaused. All things maintain their very existence through God. We know that God has intellect because the world we reside in is intelligible. God has no need to experience change or time because he actualizes their very existence, and in order to do so, must already have perfect knowledge of it. Humans, even our souls, are created beings and are not any more a part of God than anything else that exists. Jesus was unique in that he was a hypostatic union of human nature and divine nature, and even though he was an indivisible union, these natures nevertheless remained distinct.
Edit: I wrote this response before you added that this was specific to the theology of John Scotus Eriugena.
Yes. He was posthumously condemned in 1225 with an order for his books to be burned. When his works resurfaced in the 1600s, he was added to the banned books index.
Edit: Ah, yeah, this was just one thinker. Early catholic thought is diverse and fascinating. A lot of work went into reconciling religion (and the rest of society really) with the “science” of the time. There is a lot of fun exploratory work trying to reconcile Catholicism with other philosophies, only some of which became cannon. It’s one of the reasons why the scientific revolution was so jarring for all of society - it threw thousands of years of convergent philosophy across society into a paradigm shift when we were forced to abandon things like the 4 element theory.
It's easy to imagine making all the exact same decisions as someone else, if you were born into their body and lived their experiences.
A decision is a reaction from an observer: and it requires information and feedback. Is the thing that decides special? Is it the same thing as everyone else's?
If you can imagine it, does it make it more likely? Only time tells.
I always loved this as it seems to be a more modern way of interpreting the monad. Could it not be the case that all particles are actually just one thing that is not subject to time and that our reality is a snapshot of a matrix of its different potentials?
Even if there were as many positrons as electrons in the universe, I don't get the time-reversed character at a macro level. When leaving antimatter out of the picture, I dimly understand that the arrow of the arises from entropy. If time reversed particles are antiparticles, shouldn't we sometimes see a diffuse cloud of antiparticles in a lab spontaneously condense into a very low entropy concentrated configuration?
The answer is that they don’t literally go backwards in time showing reverse causality. They are representable in QFT by reversing the time component of their counterpart, which doesn’t impact how they interact with broader causality, just their internal configuration. Further - this does not play out in the lab as reversed causality even between anti particles. You can collide two positrons then detect them later at their destinations just fine in normal causality. It’s a shame because it would be really sweet to find some reversal of entropy and causality somewhere or somehow!
You may, but if you read the link, you’ll find it consistent with the second law of thermodynamics despite being clever about it. The demonstration of consistency requires a modern understanding of information theory, but it’s been long realized it’s likely not a real “out.”
_We_ are still traveling forwards in time. If you followed a cloud of antiparticles backwards in time along its direction of travel, then you would see entropy decrease yes, though regular particles would do the same if we followed them back in time.
Complications vs simplifications was a restatement of Occam’s razor as you assuredly know and knew. However complications added can be doors to other hidden processes that are simply poorly understood or observe. The increase in complications isn’t necessarily a pure gradient, it can indicate where more interesting questions lie.
In this specific case experimental evidence shows it’s almost certainly not true. It was less the complications that killed it than objective observation.
Space and time are illusions. So probably true in some sense...There is probably no electron at all...I mean, one would be quite arbitrary, why not two?
My thought is that if there's only one electron, then its probabilistic location at a place and a time, should be impacted by its own energy across all places and times. That quantum gravity comes from generalizing the Schrodinger's equation to include these energies in the phase of the wave function, causing the phase to skew and the probability to update towards the location of large mass/energies.
Gotta admit, that is probably my favorite Wikipedia article. It reads like a conversation between two stoned teenagers (which, admittedly, a lot of cosmology and quantum physics do, to non-physicists like myself).
IANP, but Ive always thought you should be able to observe reverse causality in a positron if true. That’s the primary effect of going backwards in time - a reverse in entropy.
The other side of the theory is the positron hidden in the proton. I assume a particle collider should be able to falsify this.
But it turns out antimatter isn’t supposed to actually move backwards in time but follows the same causality as everything else. It’s just that they represent their matter pairs configuration mathematically by reversing the time orientation. This isn’t super obvious but it’s very much different than going backwards in time literally. Sad!
Maybe you could disprove it by observing a electron/positron pair being created and then annihilating each other, forming a closed loop that couldn't be part of the single path traced by a single particle.
This is yet another case where a layman-written wiki article about physics is highly confusing to other laypeople, because it only tells you half the story. Particularly because it seems to be based on a chapter of Feynman's popular science book. But the book actually goes on and points out how Feynman immediately dismissed Wheeler's hypothesis, because the universe contains a lot more electrons than positrons. You'd have to explain that imbalance first if you want to entertain this line of thought.
As a layperson myself - how can we tell that a distant celestial object is not made from antimatter? Afaik, it doesn't behave differently from matter, other than it annihilates on contact.
Also even if we could, that would only describe the practically and theoretically observable universe, which doesn't rule out other places looking very different (on its own)
Because distant celestial objects accelerate a lot of matter away from them as parts of different processes. For example if there were a sizeable chunk of space were antimatter than at the edge of this space there would be a constant glow of annihilation. We don't see that anywhere (well except things like quasars doing this at small scales.
So, yea, it would have to be outside the observable universe in which that means we can do no empirical science on it therefore it not being real to us.
Dark matter represents far more of the universe than 'light' matter by volume if our physics is correct, so by that most galaxies are mostly dark matter by default. We have found a few very small ones that don't seem to be.
With this said dark matter still influences the curvature of space time so its not completely invisible. We could see a dark galaxy because it would alter the images of galaxies behind it with things like Einstein rings and crosses.
Yea, it's really more about the fact that all electrons are exactly the same regardless of the level of precision we look at them. It would be like if we found another earth and that earth was the exact same earth. Not earth like, not very close to earth. The exact same earth down to the smallest fundamental level.
it's important to realize that very few physicists accept that idea
right up there with everything that will happen in the universe has already happened and it's just a matter of zooming out on the entire time dimension (some use that idea to explain "spooky action at a distance" quantum entanglement and the quantum eraser)
but I love how wikipedia even links the PBS Space Time about it
Then wouldn't it be "one-photon"? I've heard (but don't fully understand) that massed particles are simply photons trapped in toroidal vortices, which gives them an outward charge field and lets them interact with the Higgs. Annihilation supposedly just being untangling the toroid.
Black hole, or singularity? Black hole describes the event horizon and singularity describes the point like object that would exist in a non-rotating black hole.
Asimov's 'The Last Question' is another good one that's in line: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
Is self-harm ok? What could be considered good about it?
(animated version)
It is the hypothesis that all observers are actually manifestations of a single observer experiencing all of time, space, and every point of view. All world lines across spacetime are parts of one single line "like a huge tangled knot" traced out by the one observer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman
Apocatastasis
The thesis goes something like: God is timeless. Time is necessary for change. In order to experience change, God creates universes that have time and descends into these lower states of existence. This gives rise to conscious beings - they’re literally small disconnected slices of God that descended to our state of existence. When you die, you “roll up” back into God taking your lived experience with you.
He was posthumously condemned in 1225 with an order for his books to be burned.
Edit: I wrote this response before you added that this was specific to the theology of John Scotus Eriugena.
Edit: Ah, yeah, this was just one thinker. Early catholic thought is diverse and fascinating. A lot of work went into reconciling religion (and the rest of society really) with the “science” of the time. There is a lot of fun exploratory work trying to reconcile Catholicism with other philosophies, only some of which became cannon. It’s one of the reasons why the scientific revolution was so jarring for all of society - it threw thousands of years of convergent philosophy across society into a paradigm shift when we were forced to abandon things like the 4 element theory.
A decision is a reaction from an observer: and it requires information and feedback. Is the thing that decides special? Is it the same thing as everyone else's?
If you can imagine it, does it make it more likely? Only time tells.
A decision, a choice, is a reaction: and it requires information and feedback.
Is the thing that decides special? Is your 'decider' or soul, the same as mine? Deep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation
The main referenced wiki suggests that the missing positrons are inside protons, but recent a recent LHC experiment asserts CP-violation over baryons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon
In this specific case experimental evidence shows it’s almost certainly not true. It was less the complications that killed it than objective observation.
Space is felt and so is time. Both are sensations that consciousness feels.
No hay banda! and yet we hear a band..
The other side of the theory is the positron hidden in the proton. I assume a particle collider should be able to falsify this.
But it turns out antimatter isn’t supposed to actually move backwards in time but follows the same causality as everything else. It’s just that they represent their matter pairs configuration mathematically by reversing the time orientation. This isn’t super obvious but it’s very much different than going backwards in time literally. Sad!
Also even if we could, that would only describe the practically and theoretically observable universe, which doesn't rule out other places looking very different (on its own)
So, yea, it would have to be outside the observable universe in which that means we can do no empirical science on it therefore it not being real to us.
Dark matter represents far more of the universe than 'light' matter by volume if our physics is correct, so by that most galaxies are mostly dark matter by default. We have found a few very small ones that don't seem to be.
With this said dark matter still influences the curvature of space time so its not completely invisible. We could see a dark galaxy because it would alter the images of galaxies behind it with things like Einstein rings and crosses.
Is this a diagram of particles interacting or a single thread weaving through time? Pick your metaphor.
right up there with everything that will happen in the universe has already happened and it's just a matter of zooming out on the entire time dimension (some use that idea to explain "spooky action at a distance" quantum entanglement and the quantum eraser)
but I love how wikipedia even links the PBS Space Time about it
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk
Probably not, but apparently some of the math does work.
There's been some attempts to model all particles as micro black holes or stable quantum scale gravitational objects of some kind.