{"id":2586,"date":"2012-02-15T10:53:34","date_gmt":"2012-02-15T15:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2586"},"modified":"2012-02-15T10:57:09","modified_gmt":"2012-02-15T15:57:09","slug":"the-universe-just-a-fever-delusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2586","title":{"rendered":"The Universe — Just a Fever Delusion?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s another thought-provoking article in Sci Am this month<\/a> about an experiment to find out if reality is ultimately digital<\/a>. I.e., does reality (and I mean reality as we and our sciences presently know it) ultimately come down to an \u201cemergence\u201d, a secondary effect, from the digital state of gad-zillians of tiny little \u201cinformation boxes\u201d? The experiment in question will look at light interference patterns, to see if they waver in tiny amounts. If they do, then maybe reality at the tiniest level is just a lot of digital boxes, and these tiny boxes, like anything else on that scale, are subject to random quantum fluctuation. If so, then REALITY is a bit more complicated than we thought.<\/p>\n

This all relates to some thoughts that the physics folks have had in recent years about black holes and information. In a nutshell, black holes MIGHT prove (sort-of prove actually; this hasn’t been directly observed, although it is strongly implied from what is observed) that a set of 2-dimension sheets surrounding a cube (or alternately, the surface of a sphere) can hold enough information on it to define everything about what is within that 3-dimensional space within. I.e., what kind of particle, e.g. electron, quark, neutrino, what their positions are, what their energy levels are, etc. Sort of like a holograph<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This info would have to be stored in the tiniest boxes possible, i.e. boxes that were a Planck’s length or two in width and height. That’s really tiny, 1.6 x 10 to the minus 35th power. A quark is at least 1 with 14 zeros times bigger (i.e., 100 trillion times). But then again, each quark is going to need a lot of these digital boxes to tell everything about it, including position, momentum, spin, etc. And also, you can cram a lot of quarks and electrons and such into a 3 dimensional box, taking up more and more of the boxes on the wall surface (whatever those boxes are \u2013 this is a whole new area of physics, a whole new kind of reality being postulated). <\/p>\n

But you could never cram enough stuff into that box or sphere to overwhelm the wall’s information storage capacity. Why not? Because, at some point, you’d cram in so much stuff that the shape would collapse into a black hole! That black hole might still eat more stuff, but it would automatically grow in size, giving just enough surface area to contain all the relevant info needed (theoretically) to reconstruct everything that got sucked into it.<\/p>\n

Well, that got me thinking \u2013 if a 2-D surface can specify everything, absolutely everything, about what is within a 3-D space \u2013 then could a 3-D space contain enough info to specify what happens in a 4-D \u201cspacetime\u201d ? I.e., could a static, unmoving cube containing lots of tiny info bits (again, whatever they are \u2013 some sort of new \u201cpure information\u201d particle??) somehow specify, maybe even create, a moving world with a past, present and future? Or at least the \u201cillusion\u201d of it, a la The Matrix? If so, then the big question: which would be real, and which would be the illusion? And what would limit the time component of the space-time? In the 3D from 2D example, the black hole’s gravitational collapse process sets the limits that keeps the info space from being over-booked. What would keep the 3D world-moving-thru-time (i.e., 4-D spacetime) from overwhelming the info capacity within a 3 D space? <\/p>\n

I haven’t figured that one out. But if there is such a limit, then . . . it’s kind of scary to think about. Limited volume, then limited space-time, and thus limited time. Time within that space-time box has a beginning and an end, an alpha and an omega. It means that there is an end-time process out there. The future doesn’t just go on merrily, forever and ever amen. <\/p>\n

Let’s go back to the Big Bang. There was some sort of quantum event, a real doozie, that created an existence of some sort, consisting of all the energy and matter in the universe. But it didn’t have any space to it, or very little, anyway. If my 3-D information box idea were to be true (which it probably isn’t), then very little space means very little time. But \u2013 ta da! — then came inflation! Some process started pumping space into this little speck. And with it \u2013 arguably, a future! <\/p>\n

But a future for who or what? In my own metaphysical imagination, this space-time box of Planck-length digital info cubes is a passive entity. It is like a book or a movie \u2013 it CAN tell a story, but some other form of existence needs to interact with it, to read it or watch it. Even ‘The Matrix’ assumed the existence of something that was ultimately perceiving the digital reality that the super-computers were generating (i.e., the human bodies in suspension). <\/p>\n

Does this mean that our consciousness is, in fact, a bit more spacey and metaphysical than today’s neuroscientists are making it out to be? Are the \u201cdualist\u201d philosophers who argue for some sort of ontological reality to consciousness (and not just a side-effect of neurons firing in the brain) right after all?<\/p>\n

Well, back to cosmology. So we have inflation, and thus the tiny “Big Bang” speck blows up into a huge universe. So now there are a lot of time-space info cubes, giving our universe a lot of \u201cfuture\u201d. But the cosmologists still believe that the universe is finite, limited in space and energy and matter (although they are falling in love lately with an infinite “multi-verse”<\/a>). So, there will still be an \u201cend of time\u201d, a point at which the time-dimension of the 3-D information space is exhausted. <\/p>\n

I was taught the Catholic faith as a kid, and every now and then they would talk about the end of time, God’s plan to shut it all down and make a final judgement. That was pretty scary, I thought. It used to creep me out. But that was old-school Catholicism, which is not really taught anymore. But now I’m wondering . . . was there something to it? Is there some sort of inherent limit to time as we know it, in the universe that we know? If my theory were to be right, then the “universe that we know” is really the ILLUSION of a universe that our metaphysical consciousness derives by interacting with a grand \u201cuniverse information cube\u201d created by the Big Bang and Big Inflation . . . <\/p>\n

Hmmm . . . but there is one more wild card from cosmology \u2013 the \u201cdark energy\u201d thing, which seems to be mysteriously expanding the universe, causing space to expand. The big question would be \u2013 and maybe it’s not an answerable question, for now anyway \u2013 does this process pump in more info cubes, giving the universe even more of a future? Will it go on forever, meaning that there will be no \u201cend of time\u201d in our universe, but instead a final infinite state will be achieved, a mostly static and dead situation (a wide scatter of particles too far from each other to interact in any interesting way)?<\/p>\n

Oh well, time to get my head out of the clouds, back to earth. I’m getting over the flu today, and I was thinking about this yesterday while having a fever. Maybe this was all just a fever delusion of some sort. Still . . . what is ultimately real, and what is ultimately delusion? Bets are still being taken, the race has not been run yet! We shall see how Craig Hogan’s experiment turns out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s another thought-provoking article in Sci Am this month about an experiment to find out if reality is ultimately digital. I.e., does reality (and I mean reality as we and our sciences presently know it) ultimately come down to an \u201cemergence\u201d, a secondary effect, from the digital state of gad-zillians of tiny little \u201cinformation boxes\u201d? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2586"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2586"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2588,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2586\/revisions\/2588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}