One-Electron Universe
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
(animated version)
Asimov's 'The Last Question' is another good one that's in line: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
Sorry for the digression, I’m just an atheist with a love for philosophy and spirituality.
Fantasy is fantasy. Either it's true to what's really there, or it isn't.
That is to say, it just lacks the same "baggage" of the others.
There is a friction to being pushed into believing something else: read up on Plato's 'Allegory of the Cave' for an idea of what I'm talking about.
Your own personal beliefs can become a religion if you start to shape your life around it: that is, you start thinking of, and living by, principles or guidelines that affect your behavior. The stories offer up core ideas or beliefs, but no principles or guidelines to live by.
If you find the story interesting, and don't form rigid guidelines or rules to live by: then perhaps you've just been influenced in a positive way, a way that resonates with you.
The problem with conviction, is when people try to force it onto others. It's something that has to be grown from within.
Is self-harm ok? What could be considered good about it?
2. Who says the living of lives does not repeat over time? Your/our "next" life may start in 300 B.C.
Two things science knows barely something about: consciousness and the arrow of time. The self is only an illusion. Physics has lots of symmetry. Therefore, it would make sense if the universe was fair in the end. So the egg theory actually makes sense, more sense than anything else I've heard actually.
Re 2, yes and in 300 BC you're also expected to already have been 50% alive there.
Your egg can't explain consciousness or the arrow of time either. How is the person in egg limbo, the fetus being developed I mean, conscious? How does the egg limbo work at all? You're gonna need a big hand to wave the (meta-)physics of your little egg universe away.
Self-harm isn't moral or amoral, it just is. It's as moral or amoral as deciding if you should or shouldn't eat another animal (yes, this includes humans -- Donner party anyone?).
Life isn't black and white. Where I've landed with this thought experiment through my own meditations and readings is that the universe/reality is a recursive fractal of spectrums within spectrums.
And this is just scratching the surface of this stuff.
As for the meta-time thing, functional decision theory [1] solves this. The application is particularly clean because your memories are erased between lives. There's no factor of 2 free lunch from temporal ordering.
Or you've already been said person, in which case it won't harm you anymore. Not to mention that it's inevitable that you will hurt the victim because it already happened from the victim's POV, who you've already been. The egg is in a fundamentally contradictory realm anyway because it's asserting free will and same-universe time travel at the same time.
> the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality
Allowing for psycho maxxing, yes. You can take "I should be a good person" from it, but so far you haven't made a compelling case. There's no reason why you shouldn't be an exploiter in 1-10% of your lives, living off the direct and indirect suffering of the 90%. Kind of like within a modern life you can choose to suffer 90% of the time (work, gym, studying,...) to get a halfway decent 10%.
"“Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”"
I think the word he was looking for was clichéd.
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.
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.
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.
Arnold Zuboff makes a case for this in "One Self: The Logic of Experience" (Inquiry, 1990) [0]. He calls it universalism: there has only ever been one subject of experience.
One of his thought experiments: imagine a meteorite is about to wipe out all life around you right now, instantly. If this exact experience - being you, here, thinking this - is instantiated anywhere else in the universe, it will continue there without any gaps.
Hindu mystics were already exploring and articulating these non-dual concepts in great detail thousands of years ago, in the Upanishads. As Robert Jastrow would say:
"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
My intuition for all sentience between "fragments" of a single consciousness from outside the universe was that, if Free Will™ is real, then true randomness can only come from outside a system..
> Open individualism is a view within philosophy of self, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times; in the past, present and future.
> From this perspective reincarnation in the common sense isn't true, but rather it is that people are already reincarnated as everything because no one is traveling.
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Andy Weir - The Egg (2009)
Arnold Zuboff - One self: The logic of experience (1990)
> The apparent boundaries of persons are as illusory as those in brain bisection; personal identity remains unchanged through any variation or multiplication of body or mind. In all conscious life there is only one person - I - whose existence depends merely on the presence of a quality that is inherent in all experience: its quality of being mine.
> Any conscious being would necessarily have been you anyway.
Leo Tolstoy - Esarhaddon, King of Assyria (1903)
> ..An old man appears before Esarhaddon and takes the king through a process where he experiences, from a first-person perspective, the lives of humans and non-human animals he has tormented. This reveals to him that he is everyone and that by harming others, he is actually harming himself.
Fred Hoyle - October the First Is Too Late (1966)
> Hoyle puts forward the "pigeon hole theory" which asserts that "each moment of time can be thought of as a pre-existing pigeon hole" and the pigeon hole currently being examined by your consciousness is the present and that the spotlight of consciousness does not have to move in a linear fashion; it could potentially move around in any order.
> There might be one set of pigeon holes for each person, but only one spotlight, which would mean that the "consciousness could be the same".
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From Chandogya Upanishad (8th to 6th century BCE), in the dialogue between Uddalaka and his son Śvetaketu.
Bring a banyan fruit.
Here it is, sir.
Cut it up.
I've cut it up, sir.
What do you see here?
These quite tiny seeds, sir.
Now, take one of them and cut it up.
I've cut it up, sir.
What do you see there?
Nothing, sir.
> Believe, my son: the finest essence here — that constitutes the self of this whole world; that is the truth; that is the self (ātman). And that's how you are, Śvetaketu.
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.
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
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..
It is good enough to get laid, though.
It is like saying that meter is same everywhere. Electron is a quantized energy level of electron field, a measurement.
Edit: look up a chart for the standard model of particle physics.
Is this a diagram of particles interacting or a single thread weaving through time? Pick your metaphor.
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.
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!
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.