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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank

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To: one_less who wrote (58830)	9/19/2002 10:47:10 AM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (2) of 82486

<We have expectations for a future but no one has seen or touched future space and times. > Why do we have such an expectation? I expect to get to work safely because I've done it thousands of times before and it is likely. Why the disconnect between NORMAL life and PARANORMAL life? <A big bang idea does not stop the questions because it implies that there was a something that banged and there was a before the bang.> The problem is with the way you phrase the statement of Big Bang. It is a metaphor. We all think we know what time is, but when it comes down to it, all time amounts to is the passing of events in some set order that is experimentally verifiable. Anyone who has seriously studied the physics of the universe (even as an amateur) will realize that the definitions for this fundamental property we all call "time" is really nebulous and imprecise. By phrasing your statement as "what happened before" relies on a constant definition of before and after. There are many experiments in physics that show that the notion of before and after are not absolute and at the scale of singularity have absolutely no meaning. Time is largely a perceptual trick to keep the order of events in the right place. The period at the end of this sentence existed before I typed it. It existed in my mind and its presence was the result of a sequence of logically connected events. What draws the connection is "awareness". I suspect that awareness is a fundamental property of matter. I define it as being able to determine a future state from a past state. Even electrons may have some latitude (within the confines of Quantum Mechanics) in where they will be next. I can't know that but I can prove on my scale I can move the electrons in my fingers in such a way that they hit the keys of the keyboard. Order coming out of disorder is the real fundamental question that has not been answered effectively. I believe this is analogous to catalysis. What is the energy of the idea that E=mc^2? Clearly trillions of joules of energy have been liberated by this idea in a time frame that would have never happened in nature on its own. All of the distributed uranium atoms had to swept up, sorted and then assembled carefully for this to happen. This was done in this particular case by humans. But what did it for the first microbe? I'm an animist. I think that this tendency to organize is a fundamental property of the Universe -- self-organization. It is in opposition to the other fundamental property -- decay and decomposition. One isn't good and the other isn't bad. They are complimentary aspects of the same thing. I wouldn't dream of trying to sway someone from their beliefs. My concern is that unfounded beliefs lead people to do some mighty strange things. I was in a laundromat while in college once. A woman was having a very heated argument with a disembodied voice up in the corner. Her side seemed coherent enough (it was telling her to do something and she didn't want to, it seemed).

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