Religion is defined as a way to create meaning through symbols
–Steve Lloyd-Moffet, Professor of Religion at UC Santa Barbara
LA Times Online Edition, Sunday, May 27, 2001
http://www.latimes.com/living/20010526/t000044259.html
I meant to write something yesterday about not getting laid off. It was the rumored date. Next date is targeted for end of next week. but I managed to get some work done which is nice.
I’m going to lunch… I’ll edit this and add substance later…. or not.
Had a long talk with my roommate about the 4th dimension and potentiality. Drove him to drinking (which isn’t really all that hard). We’ve decided that light might be a 5th dimensional object moving across potentiality. Either that or a 3rd dimensional object without a time element. It made sense at the time.
Having had a day to think about it I had some further thoughts about higher dimensions.
If our eyes can be considered our primary sensory organs for sensing the normal three dimensions, than our memories can be considered the primary mechanism for sensing the fourth dimension, but they are rearward facing.
Imagine for a moment if the eyes were mounted on the back of the head instead of the front. As you ran you could only see where you’ve been, not where you are going. That is the nature of our 4th dimensional sense. Always looking back…
The 5th dimension, or perhaps more accurately the dimensions in the 5+ range, are potentiality. Every possible decision has been made. Every choice chosen. Our 5th dimensional sense is extremely poor. We can only sense possibilities very close to our own 4th dimension. Probabilities and liklihoods that seems plausible from where we sit, universes very like our own.
The 4th dimension constitutes the configurations of universe that we will live through. The 5th dimension is superset of those configurations representing both the configurations that we live through and the configurations that we don’t. These other configurations would be part of the 4th dimension if we (or others) had made different choices. They possibilities that the we at this moment did not experience.
I’m not sure that there can be said to be an us when discussing the future (or the past).. There are the myriad of potential us. Some lie on the path that got us to this point and some do not. For the future, there are a million potential us. Each will look back at a different 4th dimensional path, Each will consider themselves the real one, the one that really happened. All will be wrong. They all happened, they are all out there.
Robots should not be named Hector of the Demigod series.
They should be called Igor of the Servitor series.
Just a thought
Have you ever thought conceptually about time being the 4th dimension?
As a trained computer scientist I have had to visualize the concept of a fourth dimension in the past. We consider time to be linear… it moves inexorably from birth to death. But that is merely how we perceive our movement through time.
Perhaps you recall in your very early schooling they gave us wooden blocks. They came in singles, a row of 10, a plane of 100, or a block of 1,000. Imagine each one of those single blocks constitutes the entire universe as it exists at a given moment.
We experience our lives as if we move through one of those rows of 10 cubes. But what is there to suggest that it is anything but perceptive convenience?
More to the point why assume we live in one of the rows instead of a block. The path that we experience is just one of many possible paths. Decisions don’t allow us to choose which one of several paths we take. Ultimately some version of us choose differently and experiences a different flow through time.
Perhaps this is the only way quantum mechanics probabilistic universe makes sense. Separation and flow of time is merely a mechanism for us to maintain our sanity. We don’t know how to intuitively understand time as anything but a one way jump from one moment to the next. An almost deterministic view.
But the scenario I’ve outlined makes the question of freewill moot. Do you have freewill if by definition you choose all possible choices? What does you mean when there are an infinite number of yous who have grown up in universes more or less like our own and have made decisions more and less like your own?
Thus we adopt the concept of unique identity, and lineality of time to save our sanity.
There is no how, Mr. Pilgrim, there is no why. The moment simply is.
Slaughterhouse-five (the movie)
I think today is a great day.
As it happens I lean to the left of center on all of my major issues. I hope I’d think the same way even if I leaned to the right.
At the conclusion of the last election I was clearly disappointed. As pissed as I was about Bush being elected the thing that really pissed me off was ceding the entire government to a single party. It’s dangerous in the extreme. It gives power to a parties extremists instead of the moderates.
When Sen. Jeffords left the GOP he put more power into the moderates of both parties.
The center is always the least of all evils in politics.
I feel it is time to re-write my web page.. or at least the ego home page part of it. (http://quasisemi.com/ego/)
Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pan of being a damned fool. –Belamy Brooks
This page has mostly stuff I’ve written either in school (Blood, Tears, and Death Period) or since school (Words of the Graduate). I’d like to build by Party excuse calendar but the only thing I really have in that regard is the pre-Christian valentine celebration known as lupercalia. Must work on the calendar.
Rumor had it that today is when the layoffs were going to happen. As chance would have it didn’t happen. But as I was walking from my car to work I had the Imperial March from Star Wars going through my head.
My productivity has gone to crap this week. I just can’t work under the hammer. Get it over with and let me get on with my life which ever way it goes.
It is good to have friends, is it not Mr. Garabaldi, even if only for a little while?
–Lando Molari,
“Acts of Sacrifice”, Babylon 5