Keep on keepin' on...
I now want to turn to momentum, velocity and the speed of light.
A useful metaphore may not be perfect, but it should help one to visualize many properties of a system. Our slice-time worm metaphore has allowed us to perceive a 4D universe and how time can be expressed as a space dimension, which lead to visualizing time travel... not bad! There are many things about our existance that do not have very good explanations, so our attempts to visualize them do not really leave us any worse off then we were at the beginning! Like gravity, momentum is exactly such a phenomanon. We have been able to describe the properties of momentum for a long time, but what "causes" it? Why should something at rest tend to stay at rest and something in motion tend to stay in motion?
Lets see how our Worm motif can help us visualize momentum. Remember when we talked about fixed points in the future and how we can be predestined without limiting us in the present? Well, you will need to exercise that thought a bit now. We have practiced visualizing our rib-slice-worm (RSW) in time. And practiced thinking of the RSW already existing in the future and possibly being able to move in the past. Lets play with that image a bit. Visualize yourself running down a straight section of trail and then see your RSW extending through time over that frame. Your RSW is sort of tilted in the direction that you ran and is fairly straight. Imagine the RSW being flexible, but somewhat stiff. Once you bend it in the direction down the trail, you are actually bending it in the future. Once it is bent you do not need to apply more force to make it "move", so you can just let time pass and it will express itself as moving forward through time.
Of course, we can not actually expect our RSW to float down the trail without some effort, because we still need to hold ourself up by moving our legs under us, overcoming wind resistance, avoiding obsticals and etc. However, if I was running on ice and then suddenly stopped running, I would continue to move forward until the reduced friction of the ice finally slowed me down. I can visualize the bent worm as being the means of creating the tendancy to keep moving and I can visualize my interaction with all of the surrounding worms as being the means of slowing me down... as I bend my worm into the future I must displace a lot of other future worms and I have limited energy to do that. Eventually the interaction with the other worms will cause me to "slow down" because I will then stop pushing the other worms around.
The other worms are exibiting the other property of momentum... they want to stay at rest because if they move they must push a bunch of other worms around... see? Moving through them into the future forces them to be displaced, which takes energy. If I stop appying energy, as when I stopped running, I eventually slow until my motion matches the motion of all the other worms around me. The concept of actually being "at rest" is sort of silly when you think about it... am I not on the surface of the earth spinning around 24,000 miles a day (1,000 mph)? Am I not circling the earth's orbit every year? Am I not moving with the solar system around the center of the Milky Way Galixie? What is "still"? Basically, we think of ourselves being at rest when we are matching our motion to the motion of all the other worms near us - see? If we ever find ourself in open space, with relatively few other worms around us, then we would expect to bend our worm and then sit back and move along into the future with almost no further expendature of energy. Of course we would surely find ourselves caught in some cometary eliptical orbit destined to return right back to the starting place! Can you see that creating a huge spiral racing across slice-time? At this point in my musing, I tend to think about the future "narrow gate" I need to pass through as a destination that is narrow, but accessible from anywhere in my 3D brane rather than as being some actual 3D locatiion. I can only visualize that in 4D space.
Now suppose we keep putting in more and more energy so that we go faster and faster. What will that look like? To me, I see my high velocity worm bending flatter and flatter to my "now" time surface. That means that for each slice, the next slice has to be displaced farther as I stack them up. It makes sense to me that there would be some limit to how far I could displace the slices, and that it would take more and more energy to accomplish that displacement. (Stay tuned for the next post when we will follow a single atom through time.) When we were thinking about time travel we visualized bending our RSW into an S shape in time. At the top and bottom bends of the S the direction of movement is flat, so that might cause a contradiction to the limitation of velocity except that the actual length of level travel is vanishingly small. It is like the moment in Calculus where the slope is 0, but it is exactly 0 for 0 time, so it does not actually violate the law! I love Calculus!
We will turn to the meaning of mass in the next posts and why it might be that mass increases with velocity. For now, just think about accelerating a particle. As velocity increases, the particle's mass increases, it shrinks and it takes more and more energy to accelerate it. I have read that one way to visualize the limitation of the speed of light is to imagine it taking more and more energy to accomplish the acceleration until it takes all of the energy in the universe to accelerate the tiniest particle to the speed of light. Like a nuclear reaction converting mass into energy, I would need to convert all of the mass in the universe into energy to accelerate that one particle... which would own that energy as mass but have vanishingly small length! Wow! If you packed all of that mass-energy into a single point and then it exploded, that would be a really Big Bang... ya'think?
It is sort of like the old saying that we know more and more about less and less until finally we know absoutely everything about nothing, at which point we also know absoutely nothing about everything!
(Hummm... So, why can light travel at the speed of light?)
Nois
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Rectilinear or serpentine?
Rectilinear or serpentine?
What? What now, Nois?
OK, OK, back to time travel in a minute... First we have to talk about snakes, and worms. They have various modes of locomotion, including Rectilinear and Serpentine. Actually, several of the other modes are just variations of these. Think of the last fishing worm, or night crawler you saw... not too bad a memory I hope... remember how they seemed to stretch their head out in front of them, then they latched on up front and started to move the center part of their body up by the head, then they brought the tail end up to the rest of the body... repeat. Snakes can also do that, and they also bend their bodies into S shapes and propagate that S along their bodies, which propells them forward in serpentine mode.
OK, so why, the biology lesson? Well, If our rib-slice-worms (RSWs) are going to travel in time, they need to have a mode of locomotion - right? I have thought quite a bit about these two modes and would like to explore each of them a bit. Much like the Worm metaphore for 4D existance, I am not proposing this as a practical method, but rather as a means to visualize a system where one can visualize something that is nearly impossible to visualize normally. Let's see if it helps us visualize time travel without accidentally killing grandma...
Lets talk about serpentine locomotion first. From the perspective of classic syfy, this is time travel via the RSW metaphore. If you think about "Back to the future" Michael's RSW would need to bend back on itself so that his worm could go back below the "now" surface. To get a grasp of this, think about our Flatland friend's worm. What would happen as we watched him if his slice-time worm bent enough that he made an S curve instead of just going straight up and if part of that S went below the surface of the water. Would you expect that to damage him in any way? Nope. Well, we would have to assume that he was flexible enough to stretch that far and that it does not rip him away from future "fixed points" that had to happen. Of course, we also need to allow him to move in the "past" as we discussed last post. In the current metaphore, we said that the "worm" was only self aware at the surface of the water. If, so, then we could end up in a situation at the current surface, where there would actually be 3 instances of a conscious self - up, down, up! However, with those rules, the time traveler would not be consious when he was back visiting grandma! Not exactly what I had in mind! The time traveling worm would not bother grandma a bit and would not cause any significant trouble in the past, because he already clearly exists in the present and future... eh? If the worm stays bent like that then eventually the "now" surface cones up to the top of the S, then that stream of consiousness would suddenly end and the second "up" going self-aware would sort of "take over" as the future instance. That would explain some really odd days where I can not remember doing something that I clearly did, or remember doing something that I can see that I did not do! How about you?
Maybe I am a snake in time! If a tenticle of a hydra bent down and then back up, would we expect that to damage him, the other tenticles, or significantly change the rest of the hydra higher up... nope.
Rectilinear motion is another interesting option! In this case, there is only one instance of consiousness... that is a good thing! However, there is an odd twist coused by the 'now" surface again. Lets suppose that the worm is able to stretch and squeeze himself like the worm. That would effectively take the "now.1" slice into the past or future and move some other "now.n" slice to the "now" surface. However, while the future slice was visiting the "now" surface, he would be self-aware. If he moved back to his normal surface and then eventually that became the self aware surface, he would remember being there in the past. Cool. Also, all oh his slices would experience passing through the "now" surface, so there would be an accelerated time passage for him during the move. Time would rewind very fast if he stretched the other way.
Another possiblity is that there is only one slice who is the designated driver, in that he is self-aware no matter where he goes along the time line. I find this possibility more appealing, and it fits with the syfy story lines better too! In this model, I am consious when I meet my grandma! I suppose I would have to be unconsious in the now... my wife would say she finds me drifting in another plane fairly often, so maybe that is it! I do not know what phenomanon makes me self-aware at the now surface, so I can not speculate what the rules might be for the traveling worm slices.
This experience seems similar to me as the "accedent awen" (1) I have experienced several times. Take for example a time when I witnessed a broad side collison. I was driving along a 55 mph road in North Denver in the inside lane when the light in front of me turned yellow. I made an instant decision and stopped. At exactly the moment I stepped on the break I heard the car that was behind me in the right lane accelerate to go on through the intersection. We all make those choices every time we drive... I thought they were pushing it, but hey, each person knows themselves and their car's abilities. I watched as the right lane car slowely approached the intersection. Across the intersection in the left turn lane was a car waiting to turn. When they saw me slowing to stop, they hit the gas and slowely began to turn. I was amazed to watch as the slowly turning car moved in front of the slowly crossing car to my right... why did they not both just stop! Oh well, I thought, they are going so slow, there will not be much damage... the crossing car hit the turning car on the right rear and that car spun around at least once, ending up going backwards back across the median on the other side of the intersection and into the the path of the oncoming traffic. Luckily, they were all slowing to stop at the red light and there was no additional damage. I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw the two drivers come out of both cars un-hurt... they were both mad at the other... but safe!
Wait a minute... play that back... that makes no sense. How could there have been such a forceful collision if they were moving so slow? Then I realized that I was awen... I call it being "accident awen" (1)-- that state of mind where time slows down and you experience everything in slow motion. (Some writers describe a battle awen where a warrior is able to fight better than 10 opponents because they see the opponents moving in slow motion while the opponents see them moving with lightening reflexes.) The police gathered my information as a witness, then went to handel the situation. When the policeman returned he explained that neither driver saw the other because my car blocked their vision... makes sense. He had one question for me... Did the car in the right lane enter the intersection before the light turned red... did it? Well, unfortunately, I reviewed the tape in my head several times and I never noticed the light change - duh!!! The police man sent me on my way... probably very frustrated.
So, my time travel question is, how did my brain know to go into the awen state so that I would watch the accident happen in slo-mo? Some researchers have said that our brains actually record all of those details all of the time and we arrange them to suite (Temporal Binding). So we are always assembling un-synchronized events into coherent sequences, so can easily perceive evereything in slo-mo. I don't know... not very appealing to me. I do not think I was remembering the slow-mo, I think I actually experienced it! Another school of thought (e.g. Kappa Effect) is that we can actually speed up or slow down our perception of time by how many incidents we perceive per second. So, if we want time to pass quickly, we can just become unaware of our surroundings and go into "limbo". I have a hard time doing that! About the only time I can stop my brain from whizzing around is to be fishing (and recently when barely running!)! Not sure Why! Also, if I want time to slow down, I just start to notice as many detials as possible. The mind perceives that time is passing slowly because it assumes a certain habitual rate of instance notices per second - see? This leaves me cold too because I still want to know how I knew to start watching, or perceiving those details? Others say that the adrenalin rush we have in danger slows down our perception of time.
Now, with our current RSW time travel metaphore, this is fairly easy to explain... Either I have some part of me that is a little bit aware of the future (remember when my Flatland friend agreed that he must have a little wafer thickness in time?) or I am able to slip back just a bit in time so that I can relive that snipet in slo-mo. I have thought about this a lot, and I really can not think up a better explanation... I can travel in time! And I do it on a fairly regular, but mostly unconsequential way. Suppose I was able to "change the past"... wouldn't I have told myself to look at that light?
Then again, it is possible that hearing that driver rev his engine right when I stepped on my break is what caused my mind to start recording in high-def and my perception to be in slo-mo. That would fit the second school of thought about the speed of time passing, and eliminate my time travel explanation... but, if so, wouldn't I be awen a lot?.. Like everytime something triggers my spider sense? Oh well... no easy answer here...
Nois
1. I am not referring here to the Awen of Welsh poetic inspiration, but related to it. You know how it feels to be "in awe" - right? That sort of breath stopping emotion that can comes from various sources... fear, grandness, majesty, power... accidents. Well, if you fall you are fallen - right, or If someone takes you, you are taken - eh? So if you are in awe, you are awen - see? In the Arthurian novels of Stephen A. Lawhead, he uses the term as I have - a state of mind. He talks often of the battle awen.
What? What now, Nois?
OK, OK, back to time travel in a minute... First we have to talk about snakes, and worms. They have various modes of locomotion, including Rectilinear and Serpentine. Actually, several of the other modes are just variations of these. Think of the last fishing worm, or night crawler you saw... not too bad a memory I hope... remember how they seemed to stretch their head out in front of them, then they latched on up front and started to move the center part of their body up by the head, then they brought the tail end up to the rest of the body... repeat. Snakes can also do that, and they also bend their bodies into S shapes and propagate that S along their bodies, which propells them forward in serpentine mode.
OK, so why, the biology lesson? Well, If our rib-slice-worms (RSWs) are going to travel in time, they need to have a mode of locomotion - right? I have thought quite a bit about these two modes and would like to explore each of them a bit. Much like the Worm metaphore for 4D existance, I am not proposing this as a practical method, but rather as a means to visualize a system where one can visualize something that is nearly impossible to visualize normally. Let's see if it helps us visualize time travel without accidentally killing grandma...
Lets talk about serpentine locomotion first. From the perspective of classic syfy, this is time travel via the RSW metaphore. If you think about "Back to the future" Michael's RSW would need to bend back on itself so that his worm could go back below the "now" surface. To get a grasp of this, think about our Flatland friend's worm. What would happen as we watched him if his slice-time worm bent enough that he made an S curve instead of just going straight up and if part of that S went below the surface of the water. Would you expect that to damage him in any way? Nope. Well, we would have to assume that he was flexible enough to stretch that far and that it does not rip him away from future "fixed points" that had to happen. Of course, we also need to allow him to move in the "past" as we discussed last post. In the current metaphore, we said that the "worm" was only self aware at the surface of the water. If, so, then we could end up in a situation at the current surface, where there would actually be 3 instances of a conscious self - up, down, up! However, with those rules, the time traveler would not be consious when he was back visiting grandma! Not exactly what I had in mind! The time traveling worm would not bother grandma a bit and would not cause any significant trouble in the past, because he already clearly exists in the present and future... eh? If the worm stays bent like that then eventually the "now" surface cones up to the top of the S, then that stream of consiousness would suddenly end and the second "up" going self-aware would sort of "take over" as the future instance. That would explain some really odd days where I can not remember doing something that I clearly did, or remember doing something that I can see that I did not do! How about you?
Maybe I am a snake in time! If a tenticle of a hydra bent down and then back up, would we expect that to damage him, the other tenticles, or significantly change the rest of the hydra higher up... nope.
Rectilinear motion is another interesting option! In this case, there is only one instance of consiousness... that is a good thing! However, there is an odd twist coused by the 'now" surface again. Lets suppose that the worm is able to stretch and squeeze himself like the worm. That would effectively take the "now.1" slice into the past or future and move some other "now.n" slice to the "now" surface. However, while the future slice was visiting the "now" surface, he would be self-aware. If he moved back to his normal surface and then eventually that became the self aware surface, he would remember being there in the past. Cool. Also, all oh his slices would experience passing through the "now" surface, so there would be an accelerated time passage for him during the move. Time would rewind very fast if he stretched the other way.
Another possiblity is that there is only one slice who is the designated driver, in that he is self-aware no matter where he goes along the time line. I find this possibility more appealing, and it fits with the syfy story lines better too! In this model, I am consious when I meet my grandma! I suppose I would have to be unconsious in the now... my wife would say she finds me drifting in another plane fairly often, so maybe that is it! I do not know what phenomanon makes me self-aware at the now surface, so I can not speculate what the rules might be for the traveling worm slices.
This experience seems similar to me as the "accedent awen" (1) I have experienced several times. Take for example a time when I witnessed a broad side collison. I was driving along a 55 mph road in North Denver in the inside lane when the light in front of me turned yellow. I made an instant decision and stopped. At exactly the moment I stepped on the break I heard the car that was behind me in the right lane accelerate to go on through the intersection. We all make those choices every time we drive... I thought they were pushing it, but hey, each person knows themselves and their car's abilities. I watched as the right lane car slowely approached the intersection. Across the intersection in the left turn lane was a car waiting to turn. When they saw me slowing to stop, they hit the gas and slowely began to turn. I was amazed to watch as the slowly turning car moved in front of the slowly crossing car to my right... why did they not both just stop! Oh well, I thought, they are going so slow, there will not be much damage... the crossing car hit the turning car on the right rear and that car spun around at least once, ending up going backwards back across the median on the other side of the intersection and into the the path of the oncoming traffic. Luckily, they were all slowing to stop at the red light and there was no additional damage. I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw the two drivers come out of both cars un-hurt... they were both mad at the other... but safe!
Wait a minute... play that back... that makes no sense. How could there have been such a forceful collision if they were moving so slow? Then I realized that I was awen... I call it being "accident awen" (1)-- that state of mind where time slows down and you experience everything in slow motion. (Some writers describe a battle awen where a warrior is able to fight better than 10 opponents because they see the opponents moving in slow motion while the opponents see them moving with lightening reflexes.) The police gathered my information as a witness, then went to handel the situation. When the policeman returned he explained that neither driver saw the other because my car blocked their vision... makes sense. He had one question for me... Did the car in the right lane enter the intersection before the light turned red... did it? Well, unfortunately, I reviewed the tape in my head several times and I never noticed the light change - duh!!! The police man sent me on my way... probably very frustrated.
So, my time travel question is, how did my brain know to go into the awen state so that I would watch the accident happen in slo-mo? Some researchers have said that our brains actually record all of those details all of the time and we arrange them to suite (Temporal Binding). So we are always assembling un-synchronized events into coherent sequences, so can easily perceive evereything in slo-mo. I don't know... not very appealing to me. I do not think I was remembering the slow-mo, I think I actually experienced it! Another school of thought (e.g. Kappa Effect) is that we can actually speed up or slow down our perception of time by how many incidents we perceive per second. So, if we want time to pass quickly, we can just become unaware of our surroundings and go into "limbo". I have a hard time doing that! About the only time I can stop my brain from whizzing around is to be fishing (and recently when barely running!)! Not sure Why! Also, if I want time to slow down, I just start to notice as many detials as possible. The mind perceives that time is passing slowly because it assumes a certain habitual rate of instance notices per second - see? This leaves me cold too because I still want to know how I knew to start watching, or perceiving those details? Others say that the adrenalin rush we have in danger slows down our perception of time.
Now, with our current RSW time travel metaphore, this is fairly easy to explain... Either I have some part of me that is a little bit aware of the future (remember when my Flatland friend agreed that he must have a little wafer thickness in time?) or I am able to slip back just a bit in time so that I can relive that snipet in slo-mo. I have thought about this a lot, and I really can not think up a better explanation... I can travel in time! And I do it on a fairly regular, but mostly unconsequential way. Suppose I was able to "change the past"... wouldn't I have told myself to look at that light?
Then again, it is possible that hearing that driver rev his engine right when I stepped on my break is what caused my mind to start recording in high-def and my perception to be in slo-mo. That would fit the second school of thought about the speed of time passing, and eliminate my time travel explanation... but, if so, wouldn't I be awen a lot?.. Like everytime something triggers my spider sense? Oh well... no easy answer here...
Nois
1. I am not referring here to the Awen of Welsh poetic inspiration, but related to it. You know how it feels to be "in awe" - right? That sort of breath stopping emotion that can comes from various sources... fear, grandness, majesty, power... accidents. Well, if you fall you are fallen - right, or If someone takes you, you are taken - eh? So if you are in awe, you are awen - see? In the Arthurian novels of Stephen A. Lawhead, he uses the term as I have - a state of mind. He talks often of the battle awen.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Why a Hydra? Why not a coral reef?
Why a Hydra? Why not a coral reef?
Because we did such a great job of finishing off the 300 year old argument about predistination and free will, I thouht we would tackle something simpler this post... time travel! Pretty scary with all the worry about accidently killing your gandmother while traveling to the past! Ah, but we must be brave! Our time-slice worms give us a totally different way of visualizing this interesting question... will we ever travel in time? This is too complex for one post, so we will talk about our "Past" paradigm first.
We already discussed this a little in the post "More Time for Nothng" . If our flatlander had no thickness in "hight," which was his "time," I would not be able to see him from his 2D brane! We agreed to consider him to be a thin wafer, rather than a 0-thickness surface. Then we tok little wafer snap shots of him and stacked them up to make a 3D worm from our 2D friend. Similarly, we took 2D wafer slices through our torsos to make 3D worms from ourselves and visualized a "hydra" creatures all the way back to Adam! Wow! a 12 billion bud hydra! (6 billion are "dead") We basically traded our "height" dimension for our "time" dimension.
As we grew our rib-slice-worm (RSW) I recommended that you visualize letting the "past" part of your worm sort of trail behind you as you rose through "time". This allowed us to visualize our RSW but leads to an interesting question... what is it like "down there?" In our usual paradigm of "past" we would need to think of the human-hydra as a coral reef stem - frozen like solid stone! Instead, we never gave it a thought, so our hydra was living and moving... hummm... interesting... Did you ever wonder if the past could be anything other than frozen?
I have a big problem when people, especially governments and the media '"rewrite" the past, and that is not what I am talking about! That is making the written record disagree with what happened. What I am talking about is actually changing the past! That is a very difficult paradigm shift, so let yourself relax a bit. Lets do what we did with the billion slice-space worms and concentrate on one simple example... like you! Your RSW that is. Remember when we visited flatland and watched our amoeba friend's slice-time worm move? He sort of twisted round, as worms do, but I did not mention at the time that if the part of him that was down in the watery past moved, it would be changing his past?. Right now, my RSW is pressed up against the back of my chair. Before that, I was in the kitchen. So my RSW went from the kitchen to the chair to come to the chair. Now, suppose I walked to the TV and then to the chair... Well it might not make any difference at all, but then again it could be like the buttefly Effect... suppose that during that act I saw an ad on TV that I would not have seen if I went to that chair... how far upstream would that change propagate? Hard to tell isn't it? It could totally change my life, or it might not cause any sgnificant change.
To me, the solution to this dilema is also the solution to the clasic problem about accidently killing your grandmother. Think about a hydra floating around in the water. The tenticles can float up and down, tangle together, unwind, etc. The do not damage each other do they? Suppose a tenticle hooked onto a twig. Would the rest of the tenticle have to stay froxen in the pond so that it did not pull the tenticle off the twig? Of course not! It is free to wiggle around. However, it does not wiggle around too hard and certainly not enough to hurt itself! So, why can't our RSWs worms wiggle around as long as they do not hurt themselves, including not doing something that significantly alters events? This is exactly the kind of flexibility I talked about last post about predestination... I can be soverignly passed through a future narrow gate without freezing me in time-space. I am free to wiggle around and am totally responsible for where I wiggle! So, for this post, I am just wondering if I could also do that in the past... see, if a 4D creature watched me he would just see me wiggling in time just like I watched my flatland friend's worm wiggle around.
Try that vision on for a while. We will do some real time travel next post.
Nois
Because we did such a great job of finishing off the 300 year old argument about predistination and free will, I thouht we would tackle something simpler this post... time travel! Pretty scary with all the worry about accidently killing your gandmother while traveling to the past! Ah, but we must be brave! Our time-slice worms give us a totally different way of visualizing this interesting question... will we ever travel in time? This is too complex for one post, so we will talk about our "Past" paradigm first.
We already discussed this a little in the post "More Time for Nothng" . If our flatlander had no thickness in "hight," which was his "time," I would not be able to see him from his 2D brane! We agreed to consider him to be a thin wafer, rather than a 0-thickness surface. Then we tok little wafer snap shots of him and stacked them up to make a 3D worm from our 2D friend. Similarly, we took 2D wafer slices through our torsos to make 3D worms from ourselves and visualized a "hydra" creatures all the way back to Adam! Wow! a 12 billion bud hydra! (6 billion are "dead") We basically traded our "height" dimension for our "time" dimension.
As we grew our rib-slice-worm (RSW) I recommended that you visualize letting the "past" part of your worm sort of trail behind you as you rose through "time". This allowed us to visualize our RSW but leads to an interesting question... what is it like "down there?" In our usual paradigm of "past" we would need to think of the human-hydra as a coral reef stem - frozen like solid stone! Instead, we never gave it a thought, so our hydra was living and moving... hummm... interesting... Did you ever wonder if the past could be anything other than frozen?
I have a big problem when people, especially governments and the media '"rewrite" the past, and that is not what I am talking about! That is making the written record disagree with what happened. What I am talking about is actually changing the past! That is a very difficult paradigm shift, so let yourself relax a bit. Lets do what we did with the billion slice-space worms and concentrate on one simple example... like you! Your RSW that is. Remember when we visited flatland and watched our amoeba friend's slice-time worm move? He sort of twisted round, as worms do, but I did not mention at the time that if the part of him that was down in the watery past moved, it would be changing his past?. Right now, my RSW is pressed up against the back of my chair. Before that, I was in the kitchen. So my RSW went from the kitchen to the chair to come to the chair. Now, suppose I walked to the TV and then to the chair... Well it might not make any difference at all, but then again it could be like the buttefly Effect... suppose that during that act I saw an ad on TV that I would not have seen if I went to that chair... how far upstream would that change propagate? Hard to tell isn't it? It could totally change my life, or it might not cause any sgnificant change.
To me, the solution to this dilema is also the solution to the clasic problem about accidently killing your grandmother. Think about a hydra floating around in the water. The tenticles can float up and down, tangle together, unwind, etc. The do not damage each other do they? Suppose a tenticle hooked onto a twig. Would the rest of the tenticle have to stay froxen in the pond so that it did not pull the tenticle off the twig? Of course not! It is free to wiggle around. However, it does not wiggle around too hard and certainly not enough to hurt itself! So, why can't our RSWs worms wiggle around as long as they do not hurt themselves, including not doing something that significantly alters events? This is exactly the kind of flexibility I talked about last post about predestination... I can be soverignly passed through a future narrow gate without freezing me in time-space. I am free to wiggle around and am totally responsible for where I wiggle! So, for this post, I am just wondering if I could also do that in the past... see, if a 4D creature watched me he would just see me wiggling in time just like I watched my flatland friend's worm wiggle around.
Try that vision on for a while. We will do some real time travel next post.
Nois
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Predestination and free will, at the same time...
Predestination and free will, at the same time...
When we imagined our torso rib-slice-worm (RSW) for the last post we ended up with an incredible picture of humankind all the way back to Adam! All of the hydra stalks were cross connected and twisted around each other in an amazing tangle. But we failed to think about one aspect that our 3D flatland visitor saw immediately when he looked at the amoeba... the amoeba was really a worm that stretched below (past) and above (future) the slowly rising water in the drum. For some reason, the worm was only self aware right at the water/air interface! However, the 3D visitor saw all of the worm at once... as a creature in time.
In Frank Herbert's sci fy clasic "Dune", he visualized time as a billion pre and post possibilities intersecting at now. I am not proposing the same concept, but it is a somewhat related thought. Instead, I am visualizing a creature, which exists in time-space as a billion, stacked up time slice worms. Again, we pick one slice to help visualize this creature, say, the rib-slice-worm (RSW). We spent a lot of time visualizing this guy last post and even saw him as a bud off an Adam Hydra, attached finally to the dust of the new creation. But, try to make this next leap in the visualization... Think of yourself as the 3D visitor to Flatland who could see the 3D amoeba-worm stretching both above and below the water's surface. To the time-free 4D viewer, our human worm creature already exists in the future, just as it exists in the past! Whoa... stop a while and let that soak...
My RSW is only self aware at the past/future interface just as the Flatland amoeba worm was self aware only at the water/air interface! This view of my RSW has some interesting consequences. For this post, we will only think through one of them. How do you feel about predestination? In Christianity there has been a "war" of sorts for a long time about predestination and free will. Some of the major lines of reasoning became focused in the teachings of John Calvin (Calvinistic) and Professor Armineas (Arminian). While there are various points of difference, one major one is the difference in how they see predestination and free will. After all if we are predestined to sin, then how can we be held accountable for that sin? Can we not see God as having freedom in time so that he can look "up" through the future to see me accept Christ as savior and Lord? So, I am predestinated because that is what God sees. Or, from the other side, God is soverign and he knows his children from the foundation of the universe. They are soverignly elected, and therefor arrive at the moment of rebirth. Those who are not the elect do not go through the "narrow gate". Both of them are free to choose to sin, and are fully responsible but the elect have their debt "paid in full". (if you want more details there are at least 300 years wourh of books and other writings on the subject! Eternal secutity can take a whole nother life time to ponder...)
Hummm... all of that would have seemed very hard to visualize just a few weeks ago, but now that you can view your RSW, you can see that in fact, both are true at the same time! Problem solved! God sees the entire creature from the foundation of the universe to the Adam-bud to the me-bud. God may soverignly pass my RSW through the narrow gate while I maintain full free will and responsibility for what my worm does on the way there... see? This image was an incredible reliefe 25 years ago when I was struggling with these two different theologies! Both schools seemed to have right ideas and both seemed to have weak ideas. I have never been able to give enough context to explain it to more than a few people, so hopefully you, gentle reader, are now among the group who sees this! Ordinary thought just does not allow one to think about predestnation and free will at the same time, but with our new time creatures, it is a synch! It is all just a matter of perspective!
In Watchman Nee's classic "Sit, Walk, Stand" Nee also touches this truth. He describes the believer as simultaneously seated with Christ in the heavenlies, walking through a messy life, and standing on the power of a choice for Christ all at the same time! You can visualize that easily if you think of your RSW existing at all those points already. Years later when I was talking to my daughter about how a road knows the way back to the tent, I answered "It knows because it is already there." This is also that kind of vision - see it?
I can not end this without relaying my favorite Calvinistic/Arminian story... Oh no... there he goes again... This is from a neighborhood Reformed Prespretarian (Calvinistic) pastor who was talking to us as we were thinking about changing churches. John Calvin and John Wesely (Arminian) both died, and were walking up paths to heaven. As luck would have it the paths they were on joined and as soon as they saw each other, there was great rejoycing! "John! how good to see you!" "No, John, it is my pleasure! How delightful!" (sure, they talked like that...) They continued their rejoycing and reminiscing as they walked up the path. Soon, they came to the walls of Heaven, and they saw the Pearly Gates. They stopped. Wesely looked longingly at Calvin... Calvin nodded as in final agreement... there, above the gate, was an inscription: "Whosoever will may come!" They embraced, and continued on arm in arm. They entered heaven and started to walk from the gate a bit down the street of gold. Suddenly, Wesely felt Calvin tug on his sleve... They both turned around and stared back at the Pearly Gates. There above the inside of the gates was another inscription: "Known from the foundation of the universe!" It was just a matter of perspective.
Nois
When we imagined our torso rib-slice-worm (RSW) for the last post we ended up with an incredible picture of humankind all the way back to Adam! All of the hydra stalks were cross connected and twisted around each other in an amazing tangle. But we failed to think about one aspect that our 3D flatland visitor saw immediately when he looked at the amoeba... the amoeba was really a worm that stretched below (past) and above (future) the slowly rising water in the drum. For some reason, the worm was only self aware right at the water/air interface! However, the 3D visitor saw all of the worm at once... as a creature in time.
In Frank Herbert's sci fy clasic "Dune", he visualized time as a billion pre and post possibilities intersecting at now. I am not proposing the same concept, but it is a somewhat related thought. Instead, I am visualizing a creature, which exists in time-space as a billion, stacked up time slice worms. Again, we pick one slice to help visualize this creature, say, the rib-slice-worm (RSW). We spent a lot of time visualizing this guy last post and even saw him as a bud off an Adam Hydra, attached finally to the dust of the new creation. But, try to make this next leap in the visualization... Think of yourself as the 3D visitor to Flatland who could see the 3D amoeba-worm stretching both above and below the water's surface. To the time-free 4D viewer, our human worm creature already exists in the future, just as it exists in the past! Whoa... stop a while and let that soak...
My RSW is only self aware at the past/future interface just as the Flatland amoeba worm was self aware only at the water/air interface! This view of my RSW has some interesting consequences. For this post, we will only think through one of them. How do you feel about predestination? In Christianity there has been a "war" of sorts for a long time about predestination and free will. Some of the major lines of reasoning became focused in the teachings of John Calvin (Calvinistic) and Professor Armineas (Arminian). While there are various points of difference, one major one is the difference in how they see predestination and free will. After all if we are predestined to sin, then how can we be held accountable for that sin? Can we not see God as having freedom in time so that he can look "up" through the future to see me accept Christ as savior and Lord? So, I am predestinated because that is what God sees. Or, from the other side, God is soverign and he knows his children from the foundation of the universe. They are soverignly elected, and therefor arrive at the moment of rebirth. Those who are not the elect do not go through the "narrow gate". Both of them are free to choose to sin, and are fully responsible but the elect have their debt "paid in full". (if you want more details there are at least 300 years wourh of books and other writings on the subject! Eternal secutity can take a whole nother life time to ponder...)
Hummm... all of that would have seemed very hard to visualize just a few weeks ago, but now that you can view your RSW, you can see that in fact, both are true at the same time! Problem solved! God sees the entire creature from the foundation of the universe to the Adam-bud to the me-bud. God may soverignly pass my RSW through the narrow gate while I maintain full free will and responsibility for what my worm does on the way there... see? This image was an incredible reliefe 25 years ago when I was struggling with these two different theologies! Both schools seemed to have right ideas and both seemed to have weak ideas. I have never been able to give enough context to explain it to more than a few people, so hopefully you, gentle reader, are now among the group who sees this! Ordinary thought just does not allow one to think about predestnation and free will at the same time, but with our new time creatures, it is a synch! It is all just a matter of perspective!
In Watchman Nee's classic "Sit, Walk, Stand" Nee also touches this truth. He describes the believer as simultaneously seated with Christ in the heavenlies, walking through a messy life, and standing on the power of a choice for Christ all at the same time! You can visualize that easily if you think of your RSW existing at all those points already. Years later when I was talking to my daughter about how a road knows the way back to the tent, I answered "It knows because it is already there." This is also that kind of vision - see it?
I can not end this without relaying my favorite Calvinistic/Arminian story... Oh no... there he goes again... This is from a neighborhood Reformed Prespretarian (Calvinistic) pastor who was talking to us as we were thinking about changing churches. John Calvin and John Wesely (Arminian) both died, and were walking up paths to heaven. As luck would have it the paths they were on joined and as soon as they saw each other, there was great rejoycing! "John! how good to see you!" "No, John, it is my pleasure! How delightful!" (sure, they talked like that...) They continued their rejoycing and reminiscing as they walked up the path. Soon, they came to the walls of Heaven, and they saw the Pearly Gates. They stopped. Wesely looked longingly at Calvin... Calvin nodded as in final agreement... there, above the gate, was an inscription: "Whosoever will may come!" They embraced, and continued on arm in arm. They entered heaven and started to walk from the gate a bit down the street of gold. Suddenly, Wesely felt Calvin tug on his sleve... They both turned around and stared back at the Pearly Gates. There above the inside of the gates was another inscription: "Known from the foundation of the universe!" It was just a matter of perspective.
Nois
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