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[Lagslayer]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

-snip-

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.

tl;dr

Insisting on things you can't even observe is silly. You could speculate just about anything, but in the end, you don't really know until you can see it for yourself. For example...
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I have to disagree. Humans can count, and we can do higher math, and we can do similar things. But we do them exceedingly badly. It takes millions (trillions?) of times more computational power to move your hand and grab something then it takes to multiply two twenty digit numbers together. But while the first takes a fraction of a second, the second option takes minutes (while most humans are unable to do it at all, even with years spent learning math).

From extreme outliers (mostly natural savants who can do stuff like that easily in their heads) its clear that the reason for this isn't that brains are incapable of the mathematical precision needed. Some people can do things that are mentally impossible for almost everyone else in the world trivially. Its that the brain of 99.9% of people  isn't designed for more complex math then adding small numbers together. It can, because being able to learn and adapt is really helpful and evolution has figured that out.
Now, that isn't to say that we can't work on and figure out the really complex stuff (with difficulty). Scientists can figure out how 4th (and higher) dimensional spaces would operate even the brain is clearly designed for 3 dimensions and less. But it gets harder and harder the farther you get from out default reality

Human brains are not usually specialized in that way. There is variation within the species, however. Also, exercising the brain can make it better.

Scientists can figure out how 4th (and higher) dimensional spaces would operate even the brain is clearly designed for 3 dimensions and less. But it gets harder and harder the farther you get from out default reality

We could perhaps figure it out if or when we are able to observe that 4th dimension. Right now, however, there is little to no indication or proof of anything existing outside of having 3 dimensions. We don't even have proof of actual (as opposed to theoretical) things with less than 3 dimensions.

[alway]

Lagslayer, stop using Ken Ham logic; the entirety of science and mathematics is based on the abstraction of reality. That's kinda the point. No, you will never see a cosine running free out in the wild, but it is nevertheless a powerful descriptor of reality.

[Erils]

-snip-

First of all, you haven't described it. You have simply made an analogy, but not described the thing itself. Also, your analogy just talks about why:

Before and After become exceedingly silly propositions when dealing with time dimensions which exist as part of a universe.

So, you haven't actually described the before or after themselves, other than saying that they are silly.

Also, you are trying to describe the idea of a lack of causality through the use of causality which is simply impossible. You said that when we turn the block with the bands on it, the bands become sideways or backwards, but that has only been proved here in our world of causality. Without cause and effect, the turning of the block would have no effect on the bands, nor would it have on the block itself as there is no cause and effect. Without cause and effect, no matter what you do (cause) nothing will happen (effect).

You also talk about

a timeless, spaceless non-universe

in which there is a cube. A cube cannot exist in a spaceless universe because, as a three dimensional object, it takes up space. You also say that

Your block may be next to an entirely foreign thing, like a table or book. It could be floating in space.

A table and space (to float in) both take up space as well and therefore create a paradox in your spaceless universe that you want to make an analogy for.

But now to get back to my point. While I completely agree with you alway that trying to think about a universe (if it is even that) without causality is a completely preposterous and silly idea, your analogy didn't describe what one would be like. Even in your analogy, you used things such as tables, cubes and space which contradict the idea of a spaceless non-universe and also turned the block which itself requires causality. While I completely agree with your final point that it is silly to think about, your analogy further proved what I was saying in that the human brain is incapable of separating itself from a few core concepts, such as that of causality, and therefore incapable of imagining or describing a world without these concepts.

[scrdest]

That's kind of how analogies work. They use something you understand to explain something you don't understand. If he didn't use physical objects, it would be like teaching, say, Chinese, someone who doesn't understand Chinese, in Chinese (without using non-verbal language like pointing at something).

[Descan]

So like an American tourist trying to "teach" English? 

[BFEL]

Its more like riding a dolphin on the back of a whipcreamsaurus while schoolchildren play kick the pi in the 500 thousandth digit in your uterus.
Note that the person in said example is a man, so WHERE DID HE GET THE UTERUS?

[Descan]

From U-Ter-Rent.

[Lagslayer]

Lagslayer, stop using Ken Ham logic; the entirety of science and mathematics is based on the abstraction of reality. That's kinda the point. No, you will never see a cosine running free out in the wild, but it is nevertheless a powerful descriptor of reality.

I know there's an xkcd comic for this. Where is it?

Spoiler: edit: Found it! (click to show/hide)

[Erils]

Too tired to post anything smart right now. Maybe I need to start studying sleeping methods.

[10ebbor10]

I suggest you commence with empirical research on the matter.

[da_nang]

One of the "youngest" galaxies has been found.

[olemars]

DO I LOVE SMART PEOPLE OR WHAT?

AWESOME!

Now, what does all this mean?

It means that instead of a programming language that uses a set of standard libraries, which are pieces of code and methods and functions and whatnot that are very useful that other people already wrote for you, this programming language uses a megaproject knowledge center and knowledge interpreter (in addition to having its own libraries of code).

I'm not sure if you're familiar with coding, but it's very specific, very dry, and to the untrained, pretty difficult to read. A programmer needs to know what they want to do, translate that into what a computer can do (if it can do it), translate that into a set of codes that will command the computer to do what you want it to, write that set of code and then spend your time debugging it to make sure you did it right. You use libraries of code as your basic tools to get this done to save you a bunch of time.

Wolfram programming language also has a very large library of code, but the focus is on human knowledge rather than as an interface between a human and the inner-workings of a computer. Part of its concept is that Wolfram will know things you also know either because all of the code for it has already been written for it to know (like someone taking the time to define all the countries of the world on a map in a way that a computer can understand and reference, as in the example in the article), or it can (theoretically) find out. Instead of doing all the grunt work yourself, you basically do a specialized Google search that is trained to return what you want and automatically implement it.

Wolfram is getting closer to a public release now.
There's also a preview language reference.

[Reelya]

"Kepler" describes hundreds of stars scanned in the Kepler mission, not a specific star. But it's kind of a tautology, because those stars were named "Kepler" as a result of us identifying them as objects of interest with the Kepler telescope, which was pointed at a specific patch of sky they decided to use for the survey.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-11
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-62

The Kepler mission is basically a test-run for doing scans of much larger areas of space. Most likely we would have found similar star systems whichever direction we pointed the thing, and they would be called "Kepler" instead. So, given the circular nature of the argument, I don't know of any reason to think that the specific constellation they pointed Kepler at is any better or worse for habitable planets than any other area.

The closest known candidate in the Kepler area is 472 light years away. we'll probably find stuff a lot closer to home later on, e.g. Tau Ceti e is a possible habitable zone planet 11 light years away. That's close enough we could conceivably get a probe there in ~20 years with known physics.

[alway]

Yep, and moreover, nearly all of the potentially habitable planets we know have were discovered by Kepler. It's really the first one capable of detecting planets which are both small enough and far enough from their stars to be considered potentially habitable.

The most interesting thing about the results isn't actually an individual planet: it's the statistics of the discoveries. It suggests that our solar system is probably about average, that most solar systems have some planets, and that there is a good probably that a good chunk of them have potentially habitable planets. Prior to Kepler, we really hadn't found earthlikes simply because we couldn't detect them. Which led some to draw premature conclusions about super-jupiters being very common, small planets quite rare, and our solar system as unusual. But nope, just as in pretty much everything else we learn about our place in the universe, we're smack dab in the middle of average. Which means life on other worlds is actually reasonably likely; though possibly not complex multicellular life, assuming we draw premature conclusions based on our own planet's evolutionary history.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It is truly shocking how many Earthlike planets we've already observed (62e has a better projected vegetation suitability than Earth).