Does everything past and future already exist?

I have always been intrigued by the fact that every photo ever taken (or that could have been taken) in the past, or could be taken in the present or future, of any subject (real or imagined), in any place or universe, can be computer generated. Start with the first colour in the upper left dot and make all possible variations until the dot in the lower right is the last colour. Save all these images to a memory stick (lol).

A digital photo is merely an arrangement of a finite number of dots each of which can be a finite number of colours. So the total number of possible pictures would be x to the power of y where x is the number of colours and y is the number of dots. An astronomically large number, but finite. But how could something seemingly infinite be finite?

It's not a big step from that to think of videos being generated. Again, huge numbers unmanageable by the human brain but no problem for "the universe".

Human experience could consist then of navigating through a section of this already existing stimuli; each of us in a slightly unique way.

Anyway, it completely turned me off photography to think that any photos I took would already be in that vast computer generated file !

You imagine that the photography (any photography),open the door of another world. Does that photography resonate perfectly, in the paradigm of the other circumstance?.

We need resonant glasses!, as your photography.

The humans are the result of the evolution of the nature. today the images are the sentences of our conscience. We can make with them a cosmic agreement. This cosmic agreement is the next step of the human evolution.

The picture is generated with the roots of the agreement.

The poet (Jose Lesama Lima) says that when the image penetrates the reality, history is generated.

Brainhurty.

A similar idea was discussed about a 100 years ago regarding music.
It was said at that time that very shortly there would be nothing left to say musically
Well since that time there has been no shortage of new melodies and a lot of new types of music. And all this with a palette much smaller than the computer.

A question. Why do you take pictures? Are you a professional photographer or just doing it for your own pleasure? Not that it really makes any difference.
When you take a picture, that is a frozen moment of your particular "now" which will never repeat itself, and is totally you and no one else's.
If we stop doing things because of a faint chance it will not be original, we will be paralyzed.

I guess I went off the deep end a little. I was just fascinated by the theoretical possibility of say having a 6 megapixel camera with each pixel capable of displaying 100 different shades. Permutations mathematics then says the total number of unique pictures that could be taken by that camera is:

100 to the power of 6 million.

This is a very large number understood only by the people in charge of government deficits, but still a finite number. One could imagine a large capacity external hard drive with all these pictures on it, coming boxed with the camera! Any picture you could possibly take would be on that drive, including you inside the new 2051 Bentley, or you on Mars. It would be difficult to find the good pictures as most would be a meaningless jumble of dots.

I think that you should be proud of your photographies. I encourage you to that continue speculating on that. because it is beautiful.

First on the tech side, how would you show such a picture without severe compression as it is unlikely that any display either on screen or printer would be capable of ever being able to do this level of detail.
Also human eye sight may not be able to discern such slight difference in shading.
In sound reproduction technology has already exceeded human hearing.

Photography has a lot to do with emotions, more so than with the extreme detail, as it is the connection with the viewer that is the important thing.

Wooden Shoe, that connection.
We could think of a trip to the past. I believe that with a photography (remember the movie) we could have a receiver in the past, or in the future.

I find to sense that the trip with the only photography would make us arrive to that scenario.

I find to sense that already in the place we would meet all the circumstances.

It is as if the photography called to all the forces to reconstruct.

Resonant glass!!

Hello Falcon.
I am sad that I can not understand or speak Spanish because If I could, I would be better able to understand you.

I am a realist and I do not believe we can ever travel into the past except through the memories of our mind.

Also in my 74 years I have never seen any evidence of a "Unibrain" whatever that is supposed to be.
I gave up on religion, and the notion of soul or any part of my being existing after my death.
I did not give up on one foolish idea in order to go a different foolish one.
This smells a bit like a Buddhist idea married to new age thinking.

Brainhurty703's series of images exhausting all permutations of a finite number of pixels composed of finite number of colors uploaded to an indefinitely large-enough hard-drive seems to me to be an interesting metaphor for the ubiquitous doctrine of the eternal return or eternal recurrence. (I would love to put a link here but according to the Forum's rules cannot do so.) Just Google "Wikipedia eternal return."

For example, if space's extension and the number of particles in the space in any given moment are finite (like the number of pixels in an image of a specific size), and time is infinite (as the hard-drive being as large as we please), not only will the exact position of those particles in each moment reoccur in the same configuration an infinite number of times but so will any finite sequences of those moments reoccur (i.e., like a given sequence of images on the hard drive) in an infinite amount of time.

So, according to this idea, the particular arrangement of all of the particles in the universe now, given infinite time and finite space, (i.e., this moment in time) will reoccur over and over an infinite number of times in the future and has done so in the past.

It seems to me I read Nietzsche stated something to the effect that the highest standpoint in life is to will the next moment in spite of its inevitability. (Maybe Copleston's History of Philosophy?) The closest quote I could find on the Web relating to this idea is from an analysis of a chapter of Hesse's Siddhartha: [I would love to put a link here but according to the Forum's rules cannot do so.] Just Google "Nietzsche 'affirm the next moment.'"

Dowhatican wrote : ("It seems to me I read Nietzsche stated something to the effect that the highest standpoint in life is to will the next moment in spite of its inevitability.")

A significant religious statement. 'Say yes to life' or, 'why hard determinism is not an unhappy point of view'.

I once had a dream that predicted the future very exactly. It shook my belief in free will and I had to re-think my beliefs about time and our place in it. Rightly or wrongly I believe that what will and what has happened is or was our choice and it matters not if it is observed from a different time perspective. If we watch a film are we changing the outcome by the act of observing the film? We only have memory or expectations, time is like the river that flows past our feet it appears constantly there but like time we only observe its passing.

I once had a dream that predicted the future very exactly. It shook my belief in free will ...

Another possibility is suggested by an experiment conducted by Anne M. Cleary, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, relating to the phenomenon of déjà vu.

These results support the idea that events and episodes which we experience are stored in our memory as individual elements or fragments of that event. Déjà vu may occur when specific aspects of a current situation resemble certain aspects of previously occurring situations; if there is a lot of overlap between the elements of the new and old situations, we get a strong feeling of familiarity. (From The Psychology of Déjà vu)

The experimental design design was clever. See Recognition Memory, Familiarity, and Déjà vu Experiences for access to the paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science, October 2008; vol. 17, 5: pp. 353-357.

Xris's metaphor of time reminds me of Hesse's account in Siddhartha.

But out of all secrets of the river, he (Siddhartha) today only saw one, this one touched his soul. He saw this water ran and ran, incessantly it ran, and was nevertheless always there, was always at all times the same and yet new in every moment! Great be he who would grasp this, understand this! He understood and grasped it not, only felt some idea of it stirring, a distant memory, divine voices.

De' ja vu . A strange feeling the young appear to suffer with. It appears to wain as one grows older. I can vaguelly remember the compelling feeling as I walked down a previously unknown road, believing I had been there before. De' ja vu, is not a dream and it has no evidence to support it's witness. My dream was one that can not be described as de' ja vu. It matters not if I can prove to others of it's accuracy it was sufficient for me . You need to examine my conclusions and understand the certainty that compelled me to adjust my beliefs.

De' ja vu . A strange feeling the young appear to suffer with. ...

From what I could gather from a quick check of a number of dictionaries and encyclopedias of psychology and psychiatry in my local library, déjà vu is defined differently by difference sources, and these definitions differ from lexical dictionary definitions as well.

A. M. Cleary's definition in the paper cited above is different and, it seems to me, much less presumptive from each of the others I found. She defines déjà vu as follows...

In a deja vu experience, one has a feeling of recognition in the fact of evidence that the situation was never before experienced, and the source of that feeling is unclear. ... What produces a deja vu experience explanations from the paranormal to neurological dysfunction.

Rather than attempt the explanations of paranormal to neurological, she seeks an empirical one. Some of the definitions I found include the source of the experience to be a previous dream (for example, see Wikipedia).

I located the origin of the conclusion that déjà vu experiences decline with age as being A.S. Brown, in his "A review of the deja vu experience," Psychological Bulletin, 129, 394-413. A. M. Cleary discounts this criterion because in her experience older persons attribute their experience of déjà vu to past familiarity due to increasing failure or recall. (Her explanation seems facile to me.)

As far as the actual experience of the "self-verifying" nature of the experience is concerned, most psychological and psychiatric definitions I found describe it as an "illusion," which, like Xris, I think is obviously theorizing in advance of the data. Since about 70% of the population has had this type of experience (i.e. ranging from familiarity to pre-cognition), it doesn't seem reasonable to conclude a priori that these are illusive.

I got interested in the topic when I experienced two episodes in waking life which I had dreamt some ten years before as a teenager. One of these episodes was recorded in a dream journal I kept when I started reading Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Unfortunately, the journal entry proved to be too vague to be decent confirmation of anything. Instead, like the account provided by Iris, I have only a kind of personal certainty. (O.K., I recognize from a philosophical point of view, I should have written "subjective certainty.")

Although the "self-verifying" nature of such experiences is extremely difficult to discount personally, I'm doing my best to invoke the Woodward's medical dictum, "When you hear hoofbeats, don't think zebras."

(Sorry for the length of this post--I edited it as much as I could and still have it make some sense. Although the article is somewhat dated, there's a good free summary of the research from Discover magazine at this link: The Psychology of Déjà Vu.)

Thanks for your reply. I have read certain articles about this phenomena and even though we understand how the brain can play tricks with us it can still be a very special emotive feeling.

Sorry to be so insistent but my dream was not recollection nor could it be attributed to any description of de'ja' vu. I dreamed a series of numbers that could only be predicted by the odds of 14 million to one, not impossible but highly improbable. It was witnesed by my wife who saw me frantically writting down the numbers after waking. Once again it matters not if you believe me or not but only to understand why I had to rethink my beliefs about time and the freedom to choose my path. Is it possible that time can be like a distant view spread out like a landscape to be observed from one perspective . We travel across that landscape only seeing what is occuring in our human terms. My river! we observe the river and imaging it as a frozen image unable to see the constant movement. If we step back we can see the motion of the river and each part is more clearly seen moving along its length. It is not an exact analogy but then time is a difficult concept to comprehend in human or scientific terms.