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I pretty much affirmed that I semi-understood this with the last sentence. Basically trying to think about it too hard HURT BRAIN. BRAIN HURT WITH HURTIES.
That is because the human brain did not evolve to answer these questions. The human brain was meant to have logical thinking and reasoning to help humans survive. Now that surviving is easy, we use our brains for other purposes, even if they are not what our brain was designed to do. Its the human brain's limitations that prevent certain questions from being answered, because it evolved to assist in survival, and that requires thinking about the world we can observe, not possible alternate worlds (though we are able to think about these, we can't disregard certain ideas. While we might talk about the idea of a lack of causality, can you actually imagine or describe it?).
I used to think this way. However, these days, I'm more inclined to say that is blatantly false. See, the brain didn't evolve to do a lot of things. Like counting, or multiplication, or flow fields in vector-spaces. And yet, to say they are out of reach is entirely silly. To say the same thing of topics like quantum mechanics, super-dimensional structures, and so on is the height of arrogance. If you look back throughout human history, the only difference between us and the humans living on the plains of Africa chasing down gazelles until they died of heat exhaustion is culture. And there is something incredibly important to realize in regards to that. Many of the topics you take for granted were in fact entirely alien to people a mere 500 years ago. To say any newly learned subject is beyond our abilities to comprehend is to infer that humans, as our knowledge and culture is today, is the absolute peak and pinnacle of anything it could possibly be in the future. I would claim that it isn't that we can't understand these things on a fundamental level; it's that we simply haven't figured out yet how to teach them effectively.
Now to imagine
and describe it.
...
As for the particulars of a timeless, spaceless non-universe, the best way to think about it is by analogy. Imagine you have a simple 3d wooden block. The size and shape of the block is irrelevant for this analogy. However, imagine this block is painted in a thin banded pattern along one direction, such that when you look down it from one end, you see the repeating colors: red, orange, yellow, red, orange, yellow, ect. From the opposite side of the block, you would then clearly see the bands of colors in reverse: yellow, orange, red, yellow, orange red, ect. Just simple bands of color painted in rings around the block.
You will notice that what you see is asymmetric; the pattern seen in one direction is reversed from that seen in the other. Now, these directions represent time. The colors represent physics; or more accurately, some abstract events which occur. One color follows after another, following the law of the banded pattern's repetition (physics). Likewise, they look very similar, but also different, in opposite directions. Cause and effect are thus the reactions to the 'laws of physics,' which is to say, the repeated patterns of banding, looking down one direction. Red causes Orange, Orange causes Yellow, Yellow causes red, assuming we are looking down the first direction. So there's your universe existing in a painted block of wood.
So, now say we want to get into things outside the universe. Well, you can look at the block's rings; tracing cause and effect backwards or forwards in time. You can figure out "Red was the color of the first ring; and the last ring happened to be Orange." So what came BEFORE the first ring? What CAUSED the first Red ring? What came AFTER the last ring? What was the EFFECT of the last Orange ring? The answer is, quite obviously, that such questions are entirely pointless because nothing more can be learned from the block. You can go "Before" the block, and you can go "After" the block, but your ideas as to what should come before and after the block based on looking at the block will almost certainly be entirely inaccurate in such a weird way that it would be unthinkable based only on the knowledge gained from the block. Your block may be next to other blocks with similar bands; but which are rotated at a 90 degree angle to yours. Your block may be next to an entirely foreign thing, like a table or book. It could be floating in space. And so, to look at the block and say "something Yellow must have caused this block!" or "this block must have caused something Yellow!" is positively absurd. You might even look at the block and say to yourself "The block appears to have come from Yellow and resulted in Yellow; perhaps the block exists in a sea of Yellow, or the block will appear again After the Yellow" but even that is nothing more than speculation.
You can, in fact, stretch this analogy further if you want to bend your mind a bit, in order to think about multiple varieties of time, space, and laws of physics nested within one another. Now, imagine this universe-block is sitting on your table. Simple enough. Pointing to your left is the first Red band; to your right, the last Orange band. Thus, your banding laws, moving from red to orange to yellow to red, are travelling from a Before on the left to an After on the right. Now flip the block 90 degrees, and put it back on the table in the same spot. So now think about this. Using a time dimension orthogonal to the system of physics making up the block's banding rules, you just rotated the block's time dimension. Here's the interesting thing about this: From the perspective of the block, all physics remain the same. However, it now has, from the perspective of the time dimension determining the band color, multiple things immediately Before and After it. Before the block, you have both the empty space to the left, the table underneath, and every orientation it rotated through. After the block, you have both the empty space to the right, the empty space up above, and every orientation it rotated through. Again, this all comes back around to my previous point: Before and After become exceedingly silly propositions when dealing with time dimensions which exist as part of a universe.
So that's the basics of metaphysics implied by our knowledge of how physics works in the post-Einstein world.
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Topic: SCIENCE, Gravitational waves, and the whole LIGO OST! (Read 490681 times)