Topic: FAO: atheists. How do you exist now?
Green started this discussion 12 years ago #38,642
You're sure you exist right now? Why did you not exist millions of years ago. Are you sure this is the first and last time you'll exist? The universe only started existing billions of year ago. Billions of years and this is the first time you've experienced existence? What about the time cycles? They ensure perpetual existence.
(Edited 2 minutes later.)
squeegee joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 20 minutes later[^] [v] #515,728
allow me to explain. First of all yes we do exist, and yes we all exist as individuals, but that is merely a trick of the mind. Much the way visual information is processed and interpreted so are all of the rest of your perceptions. In this processing of information the experience is interpreted by your brain as "being an individual who is conscious" in the same way as your brain interprets a series of upside down images to be a continuous right-side up existence rather than a jittery existence of individual still frames.
There is an important distinction between being an actual unique individual and being an individual who is conscious, and that distinction is that beyond our individual unique perceptions we are all identical. Think of yourself like an onion with many layers and each layer represents either a perception or an awareness. Now begin to peel away all of these things, sight, sound, taste, feeling... slowly one by one remove them, then peel away all of your memories and then what you'll have left is the awareness that you're missing these things. remove your awareness and what you are left with is consciousness of your existence. You Are. But, you are nothing particular. At this level you are no different than anyone else, or, you could say that everyone exists fundamentally as this "nugget of consciousness" or "core of being" or "soul." call it whatever you want, but it's what links everyone to each other. Hitler to Ghandi, Jesus to the Emperor of Rome. You to me. What makes us different are all the layers we start to add as we progress through our "individual existence." Now, this IS unique, and everyone perceives it as "their life" and because the brain plays a neat little trick where it makes you think that the differences extend all the way down and that everyone has a "unique soul." we do not.
So that is how you can be you today and you aren't you a thousand years ago. You WERE you a thousand years ago, and you weren't you today. But you will be. Just like how right now you're you and i'm me and not the other way around and we're not anyone else. We THINK we're not anyone else, but actually we're everyone.
does that make sense?
There is an important distinction between being an actual unique individual and being an individual who is conscious, and that distinction is that beyond our individual unique perceptions we are all identical. Think of yourself like an onion with many layers and each layer represents either a perception or an awareness. Now begin to peel away all of these things, sight, sound, taste, feeling... slowly one by one remove them, then peel away all of your memories and then what you'll have left is the awareness that you're missing these things. remove your awareness and what you are left with is consciousness of your existence. You Are. But, you are nothing particular. At this level you are no different than anyone else, or, you could say that everyone exists fundamentally as this "nugget of consciousness" or "core of being" or "soul." call it whatever you want, but it's what links everyone to each other. Hitler to Ghandi, Jesus to the Emperor of Rome. You to me. What makes us different are all the layers we start to add as we progress through our "individual existence." Now, this IS unique, and everyone perceives it as "their life" and because the brain plays a neat little trick where it makes you think that the differences extend all the way down and that everyone has a "unique soul." we do not.
So that is how you can be you today and you aren't you a thousand years ago. You WERE you a thousand years ago, and you weren't you today. But you will be. Just like how right now you're you and i'm me and not the other way around and we're not anyone else. We THINK we're not anyone else, but actually we're everyone.
does that make sense?
(Edited 1 minute later.)
Anonymous C joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 9 hours later, 10 hours after the original post[^] [v] #515,973
Anonymous C double-posted this 12 years ago, 36 seconds later, 10 hours after the original post[^] [v] #515,974
FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 6 hours later, 16 hours after the original post[^] [v] #516,017
squeegee joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 3 hours later, 19 hours after the original post[^] [v] #516,029
HaikerensGuide !dBGi/iH4eY joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 2 minutes later, 19 hours after the original post[^] [v] #516,030
Who says multiverse theory isn't compatible with atheism?
!OhBrie5EHg joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 1 hour later, 20 hours after the original post[^] [v] #516,041
I'm pretty sure time actually just started... just a moment ago... there it goes again... it keeps just starting up...
I never typed any of this... time started and there were words so i kept doing what i was doing when time started and wow, more words...
There's a theory on this... time is always begin, so time is never end.
I never typed any of this... time started and there were words so i kept doing what i was doing when time started and wow, more words...
There's a theory on this... time is always begin, so time is never end.
FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI replied with this 12 years ago, 1 hour later, 22 hours after the original post[^] [v] #516,071
squeegee replied with this 12 years ago, 1 hour later, 23 hours after the original post[^] [v] #516,092
@516,041 (!OhBrie5EHg)
allow me to explain. time is not a direction, and it is nothing like the cardinal directions we'd call the 3 degrees of freedom that create a 3D universe. we'll just call those up/down, left/right, forward/back. Now there is something that is shared by the 3 cardinal directions that they DO NOT share with time, and that's the "zero point on the graph." With directions, you can say "i'm moving up, i'm moving down, and i'm stopped" along that axis. You can stopped in all 3 cardinal directions, but you can never "stop" in time. In time you're "always moving towards the future." Or, in other words, the present is always moving into the future. Plotting time is like trying to plot a directional movement that constantly changes out from under you, so, if you're always flowing along the directional axis of "forward" then moving "back" would net you a "loss of momentum in that continuously forward direction" or a net increase in that direction. but you can never "stop," you can make your movement along that axis go faster, or go slower, but it can't stop. If you could stop movement through time, then you could merge the zero points of all directional axes and you would "drop out" of the universe. or, in other words, you would only exist in that moment where you stopped and the universe would blink past you into the future and you would cease to exist in this universe from the present going forward.
However, we know this is not true because black holes exist in the present universe and proceed to exist as we move forward through time. So if time is not a direction and the past is not distinct from the future and the present is a constantly moving "zero point" when plotted against the cardinal directions then what IS time? Well, we can start with what we know about it and build up from there. We know that time can speed up, and slow down it's rate of passage, but we can't stop the flow all together. What this reminds me of is a spinning record. At the center of the record the angular momentum of the spinning disk is measurably identical to the angular momentum of the leading edge, however, their velocities are very different. The center of the album draws out a small circle that takes t1 time to draw, but the leading edge draws out a much larger circle that takes t1 time to draw. This means the leading edge of the rotating disk is moving faster than the interior of the disk. So even though the rotational motion is the same the measurement is vastly different. Time has a similar quality to it in the the rate at which time passes can be measurably different despite the observed rate of local time regardless of motion is observed to be the same. So if you have to observers, one is stopped and the other is moving at the speed of light, and the stopped observer has a clock that measures time as passing at 1000 microseconds per second for himself he will observe the man at the speed of light as having a clock that ticks much slower. after the trip a reading of the instruments would confirm the man moving at the speed of light as having a clock that ticked slower, but to him 1 second was still measured as 1000 microseconds. His local "rate of time passage" was observed by himself to be identical to what the stopped man observed his clock to be. So in this analogy the rate at which local time passes is "angular momentum" and the measure of the difference of time's passage between the observers is the speed at which a point on a rotating disk differs from the speed of an interior point.
So time is much less a cardinal direction, and much more a rotating disk upon which we can walk from the center out to the leading edge and back again.
What this implies is that the past and the future are not distinct from the present, the present is what actually exists and the past and the future are merely modulations of this present moment. This would explain how black holes continue to exist since there is ONLY the present and there is no past for them to drop into and no future for them to fall out of. they just exist like a carbuncle of "STOP" in a sea of constantly modulating NOW. So in reality time doesn't move from the past into the future, it spins outwardly in both directions and the past is as dependent upon NOW as the future is. Time goes both ways if you want to call them ways, and the only thing that's actually ever happening is happening right now. So the big bang never actually "happened" but a big bang is required for a moment such as this to exist, and so it DID happen. But it's all happening right now at the same time, in the present, but, our experience is modulated by the specific "angular momentum" that the universe is granted by the "passage of time" which is distinctly different from the motion imparted that would modulate for the occurrence of a big bang.
That should clear things up.
allow me to explain. time is not a direction, and it is nothing like the cardinal directions we'd call the 3 degrees of freedom that create a 3D universe. we'll just call those up/down, left/right, forward/back. Now there is something that is shared by the 3 cardinal directions that they DO NOT share with time, and that's the "zero point on the graph." With directions, you can say "i'm moving up, i'm moving down, and i'm stopped" along that axis. You can stopped in all 3 cardinal directions, but you can never "stop" in time. In time you're "always moving towards the future." Or, in other words, the present is always moving into the future. Plotting time is like trying to plot a directional movement that constantly changes out from under you, so, if you're always flowing along the directional axis of "forward" then moving "back" would net you a "loss of momentum in that continuously forward direction" or a net increase in that direction. but you can never "stop," you can make your movement along that axis go faster, or go slower, but it can't stop. If you could stop movement through time, then you could merge the zero points of all directional axes and you would "drop out" of the universe. or, in other words, you would only exist in that moment where you stopped and the universe would blink past you into the future and you would cease to exist in this universe from the present going forward.
However, we know this is not true because black holes exist in the present universe and proceed to exist as we move forward through time. So if time is not a direction and the past is not distinct from the future and the present is a constantly moving "zero point" when plotted against the cardinal directions then what IS time? Well, we can start with what we know about it and build up from there. We know that time can speed up, and slow down it's rate of passage, but we can't stop the flow all together. What this reminds me of is a spinning record. At the center of the record the angular momentum of the spinning disk is measurably identical to the angular momentum of the leading edge, however, their velocities are very different. The center of the album draws out a small circle that takes t1 time to draw, but the leading edge draws out a much larger circle that takes t1 time to draw. This means the leading edge of the rotating disk is moving faster than the interior of the disk. So even though the rotational motion is the same the measurement is vastly different. Time has a similar quality to it in the the rate at which time passes can be measurably different despite the observed rate of local time regardless of motion is observed to be the same. So if you have to observers, one is stopped and the other is moving at the speed of light, and the stopped observer has a clock that measures time as passing at 1000 microseconds per second for himself he will observe the man at the speed of light as having a clock that ticks much slower. after the trip a reading of the instruments would confirm the man moving at the speed of light as having a clock that ticked slower, but to him 1 second was still measured as 1000 microseconds. His local "rate of time passage" was observed by himself to be identical to what the stopped man observed his clock to be. So in this analogy the rate at which local time passes is "angular momentum" and the measure of the difference of time's passage between the observers is the speed at which a point on a rotating disk differs from the speed of an interior point.
So time is much less a cardinal direction, and much more a rotating disk upon which we can walk from the center out to the leading edge and back again.
What this implies is that the past and the future are not distinct from the present, the present is what actually exists and the past and the future are merely modulations of this present moment. This would explain how black holes continue to exist since there is ONLY the present and there is no past for them to drop into and no future for them to fall out of. they just exist like a carbuncle of "STOP" in a sea of constantly modulating NOW. So in reality time doesn't move from the past into the future, it spins outwardly in both directions and the past is as dependent upon NOW as the future is. Time goes both ways if you want to call them ways, and the only thing that's actually ever happening is happening right now. So the big bang never actually "happened" but a big bang is required for a moment such as this to exist, and so it DID happen. But it's all happening right now at the same time, in the present, but, our experience is modulated by the specific "angular momentum" that the universe is granted by the "passage of time" which is distinctly different from the motion imparted that would modulate for the occurrence of a big bang.
That should clear things up.
!OhBrie5EHg replied with this 12 years ago, 16 hours later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #516,274
@previous (squeegee)
Okay, buuuutt... if nothing is happening.. then time is stopped.. right?
does time not require change? our clocks are based on the 'invariable' decay of a cesium atom... If that decay were to slow down or stop briefly, what happens to human time?
Okay, buuuutt... if nothing is happening.. then time is stopped.. right?
does time not require change? our clocks are based on the 'invariable' decay of a cesium atom... If that decay were to slow down or stop briefly, what happens to human time?
squeegee replied with this 12 years ago, 7 hours later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #516,346
@previous (!OhBrie5EHg)
You could put an atomic clock on a space ship and rocket it to almost the speed of light and a stationary observer would see the rate of decay slow down. If the clock were to fall into a black hole it would appear from the outside to stop and remain in a fixed position for eternity. But the clock would experience no difference in the rate at which time passes locally. It would appear that the rate of decay remained fixed and everything else in the universe was going much faster. And if the clock fell into a black hole the universe would essentially flit out of existence instantaneously by accelerating into the future so quickly that it would see the universe end before it actually hits the "surface" of the singularity.
You could put an atomic clock on a space ship and rocket it to almost the speed of light and a stationary observer would see the rate of decay slow down. If the clock were to fall into a black hole it would appear from the outside to stop and remain in a fixed position for eternity. But the clock would experience no difference in the rate at which time passes locally. It would appear that the rate of decay remained fixed and everything else in the universe was going much faster. And if the clock fell into a black hole the universe would essentially flit out of existence instantaneously by accelerating into the future so quickly that it would see the universe end before it actually hits the "surface" of the singularity.
(Edited 59 seconds later.)
!OhBrie5EHg replied with this 12 years ago, 1 hour later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #516,372
squeegee replied with this 12 years ago, 1 hour later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #516,394
!OhBrie5EHg replied with this 12 years ago, 58 seconds later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #516,395
Anonymous H joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 3 hours later, 2 days after the original post[^] [v] #516,412
There is a song which sums up the point the squeegee eloquently made.
It is called something like "it is always now, all of it is now".
It is called something like "it is always now, all of it is now".