Ruskin wrote:neopolitan wrote:
If you mean something more heaven-like, well, I consider heaven to be imaginary as you surely know.
If heaven doesn't exist then where are good God fearing Christians supposed to go when they die then? I don't think you thought this through.
You know how sometimes someone totally inappropriate makes a joke and it doesn't quite come across as a joke, but rather as something a little creepy? Example: I once lived in a flat above a small general store which was presided over by a man we called Mr Happy because he was the most dour person we knew. One evening we noticed that we were out of toilet paper (something we normally bought from much the better priced and well-lit supermarket) and had to duck down to buy some. Mr Happy made some comment about us having guests based on the oddly timed purchase and it was quite jarring. He never made jokes and, in any event, bathroom activities are usually not discussed in public with people who are, effectively, strangers. (Also, he might have been accusing us of poor cooking or inadequate hygiene and given that we were uni students, he might have been justified.)
I put your response here, Ruskie, in the same category. I think it's a joke, but ... well, coming from you, it's jarring. From a fellow non-theist it would be amusing, since it'd be gentle mocking, but what do you intend from it? Are you now able to gently mock yourself or your fellow theists (the ones foolish enough to believe in a literal heaven perhaps)?
However, as pointed out in another recent post, it's not always obvious what should be taken literally on this sub-forum, so I'll answer literally, just in case. I suspect that we are headed for the same state, not a state of bliss and not a state of despair but rather a state of non-existence (the one that, for some reason, Spiral insists on calling "the Void"). As far as living friends and relatives of these "good God fearing Christians" - they can maintain their fantasy that the dead have gone to some hell or heaven or maybe even some sort of purgatory (there being a difference between "where they go" and "where they are supposed to go").
-- Updated January 6th, 2015, 10:23 pm to add the following --
Obvious Leo wrote:neo. You may think of the speed of light as the iteration speed in the Mandelbrot set, or alternatively the processing speed of a non-linear computer.
Hm, this is hand-waving. You still have a problem with what the speed of light actually manifests as, namely the speed which light appears to travel through space. Once you take away space, you have nothing despite all your talk about iteration speeds or processing speeds of a (metaphorical?) non-linear computer.
Obvious Leo wrote:Using spatial terminology in my explanation is unavaoidable because it is embedded in our language and without it any explanation would be incomprehensible. You may assume that any spatial references I make are temporal ones.
Understood, however, you repeatedly talk about spatial phenomena - phenomena that are only intelligible in terms of space.
Obvious Leo wrote:I define physically real exactly as it is defined in physics. An entity is definable as physically real if and only if it is able to effect change in another physically real entity. In Newtonian terminology this is called doing physical work, an accurate but rather confusing turn of phrase.
Ok, in that sense, I am happy with the idea that space itself isn't "physically real". But that's still a few steps away from saying that it doesn't exist. I think you are talking about the same sort of thing as referred to by Einstein in terms of "ponderable" when
he spoke about the aether (my emphasis):
The big cheese wrote:Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense. But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it.
Neither space nor spacetime is a medium through which light passes not in which we are suspended, as briefly suggested with luminiferous aether. If that's all you mean, then we agree. But I think that that isn't all you mean.
Obvious Leo wrote:I'm going to be away interstate for a few days but I'll be back. To ameliorate your separation anxiety I'll set you some homework. In a time invariant universe how would chaotic processes be distinguishable from randomness? The question is a rhetorical one but the answer still requires some hard thinking. As a guide you might like to think about the weather.
Oh I am sure that I will survive, and if I need homework, there is plenty that has been set already by Patchy - I do wish you would stop picking up the habits of our theist friends ...
The answer to your little conundrum depends on what you mean by "time invariant". Nothing in the universe is really "time invariant" (except perhaps the minds of people like Patchy) if by "time invariant" we mean that no matter what the value of t was when we looked at something, it would be the same, this would mean there would be no change (and no apparent passage of time with respect to that thing). As we all know, if we looked closely enough at any real thing, we would see stuff whizzing around or at least jiggling in a lattice, entropy would be doing its stuff and heat would be being transferred. So let's ignore that, shall we?
Another way to look at "time invariant" would be to consider closed systems, of which the universe might be one. As a system these may well be "time invariant" in so much as certain aspects are subject to conservation - ie conservation of energy and conservation of momentum. No matter when you look at a closed system, as a system, the total energy will be the same and the total momentum within the system will not change. However, the invariance of the system,
as a system, doesn't really tell us anything about the nature of the processes within the system - whether they are chaotic or random. Although ... the system isn't really random if it's limited to being invariant.
That said, no-one was suggesting a random universe, were they? So this seems to be a bit of a misdirection.
Ignoring the "time invariance" issue, we can tell that weather isn't random because we can predict it. But again, no-one was suggesting that the weather is random.