However, my intuition and direct perception of my reality, makes me think of the universe more like a big (potentially never ending) cycle
I don’t think there is a beginning (probably no end either)
Was the chicken or egg first? To me that doesn’t make sense. They both need each other, there is no first, there is just both in an alternating cycle
Kind of like everything… at least that I can observe, from my own subjective point of view
I can think of states of cycles “mediated” (or alternated), by “unknowns”
For example, if I have a cycle that produces 1,0,1,0,1,0… I could say there is an unknown between 0 and 1 that flips between the two, but it’s something different than 0 or 1 (like an operation/action)
To me, it seems like the universe is an “unknowably” large/complex fractal of recursive cycles
Or in other words, turtles all the way down
Actually, it’s more like superimposed (rather than recursive or going in any direction)
Recursion needs to have a base case to terminate. But the basic cycle of the universe doesn’t seem to terminate (although it’s also technically unknowable for my limited finite perception in time, which it seems certain will terminate at some point)
It does not seem inconceivable that all of space-time could be a similar sort of event: an bubble of higher-rules coming into existence spontaneously, and necessarily structured to not violate the rules of whichever higher-level system governs it (moreover: this could just be quantum mechanics, the same rules as us, operating at a large scale).
Which then gets to the interesting stuff: Poincare recurrence[1]. Dynamical systems after long but non-infinite times return to existing states - aka if the universe were regarded in such a way, then there is large but not infinite amount of time before it will return to either the "big bang" start state, or on an even longer timescale, any actual moment in time that ever happens.
Which is somewhat solipsistic of course, because it's all infinities anyway: an exact version of your atoms re-existing at multiple distantly separated points in time would be a multi-verse of sorts, just across another dimension: and of course if it's the same atoms, doing deterministically the same things, then it's essentially the same consciousness - so all those spaced repetitions of events aren't meaningfully distinct, so they're kind of the same...except they're also infinite, because they can just keep recurring.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_recurrence_theor...
> because it's all infinities anyway: an exact version of your atoms re-existing at multiple distantly separated points in time would be a multi-verse of sorts
This is truly fascinating, I hadn’t heard of this. I interpret it as “aliasing”. So even though aliasing is usually defined in terms of the limit of the resolution of a signal processing system. You could say it also applies to our perception of the universe. At some point we hit our sampling rate limit and so anything we perceive could also be the alias of something at a different frequency that we can’t perceive
Kind of how we do with ultraviolet light. We can’t directly see it, so then we add an additional color. Or how we alias infrared or x-ray for astrophotography
And this is also how neural networks work: they convert everything to embedding vectors of a certain (finite) size, so then all information is essentially being mapped to a limited number of meanings, whose combinations (superposition?) determine the overall meaning of something
Essentially, is there time-aliasing* in our measurements? And if so, does that point to cyclical processes and thus uncertainty about any potential absolute age of the universe? ie. If the universe behaves in a cycle, we might not be able to tell what number of cycle we are in, but maybe only our current stage/progress along the overall cycle
* the “double slit in time” experiment seems to show that https://youtu.be/b9O6iCM4vCg?feature=shared
All religion and creation myths boil down to 1 of the following:
- something made it
- it's always been here
- it's alive and we can interact with it
It also makes sense thinking about our own creation:
- we were made by our parents (and our experience in the world)
- our matter/energy has always been here (or so it seems)
- we feel alive and can interact with our environment and other things seemingly alive or not (rocks, etc)
Btw, if we are alive and made up of matter that was already here, what separates us from non-living things?