Where do numbers come from? + Quantum superposition could unravel ‘grandpa paradox’

[Secular Sanity]

It's context. Thought it was a trick question.

I mean if nothing is happening then nothing is happening everywhere. How can there be something happening anywhere when nothing's happening?

At once is a moment in time, not a volume/area of space. 

If the universe contains everything then it stands to reason anything hasn't gone anywhere. Is it leaking?

Feynman had some cool diagrams.

Nah, I'm not a tricky-tricky girl.

IOW, time is not an absolute.  "Now" is in your rest frame.

They call it spacetime for a reason.  You know that.

Night, Zinman.

[Zinjanthropos]

I love those moments when watching soccer on tv when you think the ball's going one way and it's actually going another, the beauty of observation. Watching action on a 2D screen from your 3D world will fool the brain. Ever wonder how or if we can be fooled by observing 3D action from a 4D world?

Take instantaneous movement for example, point A to point B in no time whatsoever. Seems impossible but could it explain one particle in 2 or more places at once? When I watch 2D tv action, obviously one of 3 spatial dimensions is missing. Ever think that an observation from our 4D world may not include the time dimension? Don't know why but this thought hit me while laying in bed this morning.

[Secular Sanity]

I love those moments when watching soccer on tv when you think the ball's going one way and it's actually going another, the beauty of observation. Watching action on a 2D screen from your 3D world will fool the brain. Ever wonder how or if we can be fooled by observing 3D action from a 4D world?

Take instantaneous movement for example, point A to point B in no time whatsoever. Seems impossible but could it explain one particle in 2 or more places at once? When I watch 2D tv action, obviously one of 3 spatial dimensions is missing. Ever think that an observation from our 4D world may not include the time dimension? Don't know why but this thought hit me while laying in bed this morning.

You've indicted that you've posted on science boards for quite some time.  How much do you know about 2D projectile motion?  You know, like the riverboat problem or the dropped vs. fired bullet?

[Zinjanthropos]

I love those moments when watching soccer on tv when you think the ball's going one way and it's actually going another, the beauty of observation. Watching action on a 2D screen from your 3D world will fool the brain. Ever wonder how or if we can be fooled by observing 3D action from a 4D world?

Take instantaneous movement for example, point A to point B in no time whatsoever. Seems impossible but could it explain one particle in 2 or more places at once? When I watch 2D tv action, obviously one of 3 spatial dimensions is missing. Ever think that an observation from our 4D world may not include the time dimension? Don't know why but this thought hit me while laying in bed this morning.

You've indicted that you've posted on science boards for quite some time.  How much do you know about 2D projectile motion?  You know, like the riverboat problem or the dropped vs. fired bullet?

I am familiar with boats and bullets. These days I just wonder about stuff. I use that word (wonder) a lot if you haven't noticed. In between I golf, fish, referee basketball and do what my wife asks. 

[Secular Sanity]

Ever think that an observation from our 4D world may not include the time dimension?

As you know, all great authors take one word, stretch it into a sentence, a paragraph, and then a book.  Moses was no different.  He took one commandment an turned it into a tablet.

I don’t really understand why you "wonder" about anything at all.  You already know the answer. The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, isn’t 42.  42 million is the cash prize for the correct answer and your answer was correct. We have a WINNER!

do what my wife asks

You can pick up the cash prize at the following location…

but here’s the catch…

Ever think that an observation from our 4D world may not include the time dimension?

We live in a 3D world.  A four-dimensional space just adds one number to the three we already know, and that number can represent many different things.  This number will not be included.  If you’re late, you risk forfeiting the entire amount.  Good luck!
43.086442N-79.068389W-86 m

In physics, time as we know it disappears, until you get to relativity, and then everything in this world is relative, my dear Watson. 

No absolute time.  No absolute space.

If you’re "wondering" if time is an illusion, you should probably start a new topic.

[Zinjanthropos]

 Not for one minute do I think time is an illusion. (Always try to work in a pun where possible)

Hey, I made up a saying(s) which I think is cute: 

I can't see everything.....there's too many photons in my eyes.

Or

I can't get past the photons to see if there's anything else.

Are they worthy?

[Secular Sanity]

Are they worthy?

Lighthearted.

[Zinjanthropos]

I'm going to wax philosophic for a minute....What are we, 15-18 billion years in? Lawrence Krauss once said something along the lines that humans are fortunate to come along at this time to study the universe because at some point evidence of its origins will have long disappeared in the far future, a time when evidence of other galaxies et al is long gone. Somehow I think an intelligent being will formulate a theory or even a TOE despite missing most of the true evidence.

Who's to say that at this moment in time that crucial evidence hasn't already left for good? We have no way of knowing and we march on to complete a theory(ies) to explain it all despite not knowing. So confident are we that it all can be figured out, and everything we need to know will someday be discovered. Personally I don't think it possible because we may be missing vital evidence that left the scene long before man came along. Can't prove it but I don't think that possibility should be discounted. So in our relentless pursuit I am positive that we actually will produce a good theory that will sound irrefutable but there will always be that nagging doubt about the truth.

[Zinjanthropos]

http://www.zmescience.com/science/news-s...nesthesia/

Welcome to my world. Do I think I really see space or time? No I don't but some people claim they do. Do I see the world differently than most? I'm certain of that. Maybe my visualizing is an evolutionary trick, a genetic mutation, an ancestral throwback or for all I know, normal. It makes me question things, like is my red your red, as in seeing it differently. I figured that since I still get around normally that whatever or how we see things basically leaves the same result.

I can't play sports without noticing very visual patterns that sort of guide me through the contest. Time appears as something similar to a road or track. Hours, days, months and years are like a convoy of trucks moving towards and away from me, my own Doppler effect. Mind you, it doesn't blind me from everyday activity. I just assume that's the way my brain interprets sight and for whatever reason makes space and time seem like real tangible things.

[C C]

http://www.zmescience.com/science/news-s...nesthesia/

Welcome to my world. Do I think I really see space or time? No I don't but some people claim they do. Do I see the world differently than most? I'm certain of that. Maybe my visualizing is an evolutionary trick, a genetic mutation, an ancestral throwback or for all I know, normal. It makes me question things, like is my red your red, as in seeing it differently. I figured that since I still get around normally that whatever or how we see things basically leaves the same result.

I can't play sports without noticing very visual patterns that sort of guide me through the contest. Time appears as something similar to a road or track. Hours, days, months and years are like a convoy of trucks moving towards and away from me, my own Doppler effect. Mind you, it doesn't blind me from everyday activity. I just assume that's the way my brain interprets sight and for whatever reason makes space and time seem like real tangible things.

Change is "real" in terms of our extrospective experiences (the sensory related manifestations of the external world -- whether visual, aural, tactile, etc). If certain things and occurrences seem to be simply "given" to you (intuition rather than falling out of the language processes of reflective thought) and those are also inter-subjectively available / confirmed by others -- as well as not controllable by personal will or wishes -- then they are "real" in an empirical / phenomenal context.

Whereas "time" is an organization or framework for structuring changes (whether the easily grasped artifacts of calendars and time-keeping devices, or the esoteric mathematical constructs and abstractions of physics). The term is also often used to refer to some supposed flow or flux from one moment to the next (what would be "flowing"?), but that notion stems from change.

Historically in the West, it was the Eleatic School (of philosophy) which began the trend of shifting the status of "real" from the commonsense appearances of the extrospective world to the abstract objects / principles of a metaphysical territory that could only be apprehended by intellect, reasoning, or inferential activity. ("Experiment" might also be tossed in there with the advent of modern science, but that also involves "thinking" to derive a conclusion from the research, as well as the prior planning / motives to devise an experiment to interrogate nature, in the first place).

Thus today there is this preoccupation of whether or not such and such time framework, and change, is "real" in the context of an invisible manner of existence (or provenance / cause for our experiences). "Invisible" from the standpoint that even the experience-independent domain or kind of existence sported in scientific realism does not present itself except when there are processes traditionally referred to as "mental" generating its "showing" as images, sounds, odors, etc (or converting its otherwise conceptual style of existence to such phenomena).

Immanuel Kant tried to reverse the trend that the Eleatics began, of the latter's shifting the classification of "real, truth, and the like" solely to an absolute level devoid of the relational contingencies and of the mutable, extrospective / sensible world. Unfortunately, that particular nuance escaped many of his reviewers as well as the later post-Kantians.

KANT: The dictum of all genuine idealists from the Eleatic school to Bishop Berkeley, is contained in this formula: "All cognition through the senses and experience is nothing but sheer illusion, and only, in the ideas of the pure understanding and reason there is truth." The principle that throughout dominates and determines my Idealism, is on the contrary: "All cognition of things merely from pure understanding or pure reason is nothing but sheer illusion, and only in experience is there truth."

Kant's influences are historically applicable to these synesthetes (and you also, Zin?) who claim to "see" a time framework as something sensible or intuitive. Since he pointed out that even our conventional everyday experiences are conforming to prior in rank forms or formulas for producing such manifestations. Which is stay, our sensations are regulated by underlying templates for space / time.

In retrospect, that should have been kind of obvious for any anti-panpsychism materialist schools of philosophy, since it's usually taken by them that everything disappears when we die (when the brain / body ceases functioning). There's not even a cognition of "nothingness" that's expanded spatially and enduring temporally. Again, the matter (and world) of that ideological context doesn't even show itself (have evidence for itself) when minus its arrangement as a mind (see Schrödinger quote below, as example).

KANT: By transcendental idealism I mean the doctrine that appearances are to be regarded as being, one and all, representations only[*], not things in themselves, and that time and space are therefore only sensible forms of our intuition, not determinations given as existing by themselves, nor conditions of objects viewed as things in themselves. ([*] When assuming there is a phenomena-independent level slash things-in-themselves or the Eleatic tradition's "ultimate truth realm", as in popular anti-panpsychic materialist doctrines or worldview stances.)

ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER: The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simple: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness?

KANT: No doubt I, as represented by the internal sense in time, and objects in space outside me, are two specifically different [types of] phenomena, but they are not therefore conceived as different things [substances]. The transcendental object [ultimate provenance], which forms the foundation of external phenomena [extrospective half of experience], and the other, which forms the foundation of our internal intuition [introspective half of experience and personal thoughts], is therefore neither matter, nor a thinking being by itself, but simply an unknown cause of [both divisions of] phenomena which supply to us the empirical concept of both.