Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

Michael -- those of us who were present at the genesis (LOL!) of this forum understand why it was created. It's the forum equivalent of flypaper.

It keeps safe the other forums where the content can be kept more pure (except of course when a flame-war over aperture vs. seeing or obstructed vs. unobstructed designs, etc. gets going).

Heated and highly opinionated discussion is the norm with this subject matter. If you find the forum 'grotesque' and 'offensive' then why are you so drawn to it?

Posted this on cosmology/physics but decided to post it here too because I think it could have philosophical ramifications.

It seems that we define the direction of time flow by generally decreasing energy states, along with generally increasing accumulation of information.

After all, at the Big Bang, we had extremely high energy, and things have been going downhill ever since. However, with supersymmetry, there was also very little information, things were very uniform. As energy has been released, lots of particles have come into being, galaxies and solar systems have gotten organized, life has evolved, suddenly there is lots of "stuff" and information, in exchange for all the energy that's been sacrificed.

So we lose energy and accumulate information, the "now" is pretty much defined as the point up to which information has been accumulated -- even if the future already exists we can't "know" about it now because it would require us to have a higher informational state that exists and this point in the spacetime continuum.

So what if the "past" is just a place in the continuum of higher energy and less information, and the "future" is just a place of lower energy and more information? Then maybe "now", or even our "lifespan", is not a time that we 'move' through, but simply a place on a spectrum, like yellow sitting between green and orange in the visible spectrum. Then 'death' is not an end of existence, but simply a boundary of existence, in much the same way that the edge of your body is.

And what happens to this spectrum if in the deep future, all particles disassociate and all the 'information' in the universe gets presumably lost? Might the 'energy' component somehow be 'reset' in this process by means we haven't yet figured out?

Thoughts?

It's Friday! Hmmmm, unless the passage of time is an illusion, just positions along a coordinate system. In which case it's never really Friday. Or it always is, depending on how you look at it. But why does it feel like 'now' is Friday? Why isn't it Saturday or Thursday? Of course every other moment I've experienced feels like 'now' too, a week ago it felt like 'now' was last Friday, but NOW 'now' really is this Friday and oh dear I've gone cross-eyed again

Well, Mars, the god of War, currently has much of his south pole exposed, and when he saw you were going to try to have a peek with a new more powerful scope he contacted his friend Thor to come down with some clouds and cover his ass until you look the other way.

Another explanation: your wife is feeling amorous tonight and prayed for clouds.

Or:
Your wife is tired of being awakened at 2:00 a.m. every night when you bumble into the bedroom after observing and prayed for clouds.

Or:
You live in the midwest where everything is dying from the worst drought in years and you're up against several million people all praying for clouds and rain.

I thought this might be an appropriate topic today. For the word "evil" came up frequently after September 11th. The hijackers joined the ranks of murderers, rapists and despots that we consider "evil".

But what, really, is evil? Not looking for definition by action, i.e. someone who flies a plane into a tower, but what really IS it? And why does it exist? Does it have some strange role to play in our development and history, or is it simply an aberration of our nature?

I thought this might be an interesting plane of discussion too. Because politics usually involved vilification of another view, or talking about how the 'other side' has an "agenda" for whatever evil-doing their party has planned.

But let's face it. Right, left, middle etc. they all have the same goal: the betterment of society and quality of life for everyone. What is in dispute, and always debated, is how this is achieved.

So, what's REALLY the philosophy of your politics? WHY, at the heart of your reasoning, beliefs and values, are you a conservative / liberal / moderate / centrist / other?

I have several thoughts on this:

1) as far as 'harvesting' information from other races: I doubt that a race that is, say, 100,000 or 1,000,000 years ahead of us will find any of our "technology" useful. They might find it quaint or amusing or something, but hardly anything that would give them some 'advantage'. We find stone tools left by cavemen interesting, but this knowledge of prehistoric technology doesn't give us any tactical advantage over any modern day foes.

2) then how about 'harvesting' information from superior races? Hmmmm, probably just as unlikely. You could throw a state-of-the-art computer in front of a neandertal but it's unlikely he'd glean much useful information about it unless you gave him a LOT of help.

3) I've said this before, but it could simply be that we're the FIRST in our galaxy. Keep in mind we're still very early in the History of the Universe. Stars and solar systems have been around most of that while, but you need second-generation systems to have the heavy elements needed for technology and space travel and these haven't been in place as long.

4) Maybe most intelligent races don't even become spacefaring. Maybe their budget deficits are too big to afford it. Maybe they're too busy fighting wars with fellow members of their species on their own homeworld. Maybe they haven't figured out chemical propulsion or don't have the elements on their world necessary for it. Maybe they don't have a massive moon-satellite hanging in the sky that's been beckoning to them and stirring their imagination for the 2 million years that they've been around. Would we be as far in space as we are without the Moon staring us in the face? I mean, we went there because IT'S THERE!

Part of this abortion debate-thingy almost started down what I think is a potentially very interesting sidebar -- specifically, regarding the very function of law:

1) To maintain ethics and integrity in a society, OR:
2) To maintain order in society (ethical concerns being secondary, if not irrelevant)

If (1), who decides what some of these ethics are, as there seem to be some very contentious divisions on some. Or is (1) really the prerogative of 'religion' or one's personal philosophy, so that (2) is Law's function? But if it's (2), then why do we fuss with legally defining all sorts of rights and liberties and such, which arguably are ideals which have little to do with maintaining order?

Opinions?