Psychonaut
01-19-2009, 05:16 AM
...continued from here (http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1577&page=2).
Most folks tend to think of it as, either/or. But why not a mixture of both? There ARE certain inevitables in life
This is generally my outlook as well. It should be obvious to everyone that there is a certain level of physical and biological determinism that follows from the way matter works and the way our bodies are put together. Normally, I'll look at "free will" as our having a modicum of choice within a preprogrammed genetic framework that we are born with. I think that we are all born with a loose pattern and that our acts of "free will" fill in the details of the generalized pattern.
I like to see life precisely as the Norns woven tapestry...they might have the Fate issues already set into the pattern, but we`re free to add the colour, the richness of the thread, and yes, even the knots.
In this vein, I am reminded of a theory of time that enables us to, quite literally, view each persons life as a strand of thread in a multi-dimensional tapestry. What follows is an excerpt, hand types by your truly, from Rudolf von Bitter Rucker's book Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension (pp. 57-58):
As I write this there is a fly zooming around my desk. It's almost winter and he has come in to get warm and eat garbage. When he is in motion (and now that I am writing about him he is putting on quite a show) I do not actually see a moving black object. I see, rather, a sort of trail in space.
Pause here and wave your right hand in a complicated 3-D pattern. Look at the trails. In what sense do they exist? What would it be like if your hand was at each of its positions at once? What if you move your hand from your nose to your ear and then back to your nose--why doesn't the old hand at the nose get in the way of the new hand at the nose?
The viewpoint that we wish to develop in this chapter is that all 3-D objects are actually trails in 4-D space-time. "Space" is a fairly arbitrary 3-D cross section of the space-time which we imagine to be moving forward in the direction of the remaining dimension, "time."
Is, then, time the fourth dimension? Not necessarily. You could still have four dimensions--say three to live in and one to curve space in the direction of--and then throw in time as the fifth dimension. It is possible and useful to view time as a higher dimension, but the reader should not jump to the conclusion that whenever we talk about a higher dimension we are referring to time; many of the ideas about the fourth dimension that we have outlined are no longer valid if you insist that the fourth dimension is simply time. Some things that are possible in pure four dimensional space are not possible in four dimensional space-time.
To get a good mental image of space-time, let us return to Flatland. Suppose that A. Square is sitting alone in a field. At noon he sees his father, A. Triangle, approaching from the west. A. Triangle reaches A. Square's side at 12:05, talks to him briefly, and then slides back to where he came from. Now, if we thing of time as being a direction perpendicular to space, then we can represent the Flatlanders' time as a direction perpendicular to the plane of Flatland. Assuming that "later in time" and "higher in the third dimension" are the same thing, we can represent a motionless Flatlander by a vertical worm or a rail and a moving Flatlander by a curving worm or trail, as we have done in Figure 78.
We can think of these 3-D space-time worms as existing timelessly. We can use them to produce animated Flatland by taking a 2-D plane, moving it upward (forwards in time) and watching the motions of the figures formed by the intersections of the worms with the moving place. Try to imagine a picture like Figure 78 which encompassed the entire space and time of Flatland. A vast tangle of worms of varying thickness! Actually, each worm would be a tangle of threads, where a thread would correspond fo the trail of an atom. Given the fact that every atom in one's body is replaced every seven years or so, we can see that there is actually no single thread that goes the whole length of one's life. A living individual is a persistent pattern rather than a particular collection of particles.
It is an interesting mental exercise to try and see our world in terms of space-time. Walking through a crowd of people, for instance, one can try to see the people as trails in space-time rather than objects moving forwards in space-time. Under this view what our world really consists of is "worms" in 4-D space-time. The universe at any instant is a particular 3-D cross section of this 4-D structure.
Note: This selection is a bit easier to understand with the illustrations that you can see here (http://books.google.com/books?id=QQZxBqtKtnMC&pg=PA57&lpg=PA57&dq=%22as+I+write+this+there+is+a+fly+zooming%22&source=web&ots=EIWYMbSSgP&sig=ngllHxz589mQbQ2hEgY2dSlb1gM&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result).
Most folks tend to think of it as, either/or. But why not a mixture of both? There ARE certain inevitables in life
This is generally my outlook as well. It should be obvious to everyone that there is a certain level of physical and biological determinism that follows from the way matter works and the way our bodies are put together. Normally, I'll look at "free will" as our having a modicum of choice within a preprogrammed genetic framework that we are born with. I think that we are all born with a loose pattern and that our acts of "free will" fill in the details of the generalized pattern.
I like to see life precisely as the Norns woven tapestry...they might have the Fate issues already set into the pattern, but we`re free to add the colour, the richness of the thread, and yes, even the knots.
In this vein, I am reminded of a theory of time that enables us to, quite literally, view each persons life as a strand of thread in a multi-dimensional tapestry. What follows is an excerpt, hand types by your truly, from Rudolf von Bitter Rucker's book Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension (pp. 57-58):
As I write this there is a fly zooming around my desk. It's almost winter and he has come in to get warm and eat garbage. When he is in motion (and now that I am writing about him he is putting on quite a show) I do not actually see a moving black object. I see, rather, a sort of trail in space.
Pause here and wave your right hand in a complicated 3-D pattern. Look at the trails. In what sense do they exist? What would it be like if your hand was at each of its positions at once? What if you move your hand from your nose to your ear and then back to your nose--why doesn't the old hand at the nose get in the way of the new hand at the nose?
The viewpoint that we wish to develop in this chapter is that all 3-D objects are actually trails in 4-D space-time. "Space" is a fairly arbitrary 3-D cross section of the space-time which we imagine to be moving forward in the direction of the remaining dimension, "time."
Is, then, time the fourth dimension? Not necessarily. You could still have four dimensions--say three to live in and one to curve space in the direction of--and then throw in time as the fifth dimension. It is possible and useful to view time as a higher dimension, but the reader should not jump to the conclusion that whenever we talk about a higher dimension we are referring to time; many of the ideas about the fourth dimension that we have outlined are no longer valid if you insist that the fourth dimension is simply time. Some things that are possible in pure four dimensional space are not possible in four dimensional space-time.
To get a good mental image of space-time, let us return to Flatland. Suppose that A. Square is sitting alone in a field. At noon he sees his father, A. Triangle, approaching from the west. A. Triangle reaches A. Square's side at 12:05, talks to him briefly, and then slides back to where he came from. Now, if we thing of time as being a direction perpendicular to space, then we can represent the Flatlanders' time as a direction perpendicular to the plane of Flatland. Assuming that "later in time" and "higher in the third dimension" are the same thing, we can represent a motionless Flatlander by a vertical worm or a rail and a moving Flatlander by a curving worm or trail, as we have done in Figure 78.
We can think of these 3-D space-time worms as existing timelessly. We can use them to produce animated Flatland by taking a 2-D plane, moving it upward (forwards in time) and watching the motions of the figures formed by the intersections of the worms with the moving place. Try to imagine a picture like Figure 78 which encompassed the entire space and time of Flatland. A vast tangle of worms of varying thickness! Actually, each worm would be a tangle of threads, where a thread would correspond fo the trail of an atom. Given the fact that every atom in one's body is replaced every seven years or so, we can see that there is actually no single thread that goes the whole length of one's life. A living individual is a persistent pattern rather than a particular collection of particles.
It is an interesting mental exercise to try and see our world in terms of space-time. Walking through a crowd of people, for instance, one can try to see the people as trails in space-time rather than objects moving forwards in space-time. Under this view what our world really consists of is "worms" in 4-D space-time. The universe at any instant is a particular 3-D cross section of this 4-D structure.
Note: This selection is a bit easier to understand with the illustrations that you can see here (http://books.google.com/books?id=QQZxBqtKtnMC&pg=PA57&lpg=PA57&dq=%22as+I+write+this+there+is+a+fly+zooming%22&source=web&ots=EIWYMbSSgP&sig=ngllHxz589mQbQ2hEgY2dSlb1gM&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result).