Marcus Flavius: You are saying (not just implying or hinting, but repeatedly coming out and saying) that if you personally don’t like something, then just because you don’t like it, it’s therefore not true.
Sorry you feel that way, but it’s not a super useful point of view.
You don’t get what I am saying. Physics can explain the mechanistic parts of the system, just like physics can explain the physical reality of The Iliad in the sense of the construction of the paper, how ink was transferred to it, the biology of the arm that wrote it, etc. But physics can not explain the ideas within it. Now we are in the realm of complexity, computing, and information. This does not make the The Iliad a violation of physics. It means that physics is the wrong tool to use to understand it and what it means.
Complex Sytems are greater than the sum of their parts because they exhibit emergence. They have characteristics that are not reduceable to the actions of the actors themselves, but instead emerge from the interactions between them. Try to dive below the level of the system itself, and the information just isn’t there.
This is why the traditional scientific method of reductionism does not work on them. A complicated machine can be understood by breaking it down into ever smaller pieces. A complex system does not work that way. For example, let’s dive into Homer’s brain and see if we can find where the the ideas in the Iliad came from. At the highest level, we can see billions of neurons firing, and those are responsible for ‘thought’. We have a general idea of where certain brain functions occur. But no single neuron contains a thought. Not even a million of them. Thoughts are what emerge from complex wiring and firing of neurons. But at a high level you can’t see what the neurons are doing, and if you dive down to the level of neurons, all you see is electrical and chemical activity.
This is why we can’t use scientific reductionism and physics to explain what consciousness is or where the ideas that went into The Iliad came from. Using physics to understand this is like trying to understand how Microsoft Windows works by inspecting the hardware of a PC. You can get some idea of how the software runs by inspecting the CPU and learning about Von Neumann architectures and such, but the crucual information you need is in the software, not the PC.
This is also why economists constantly fail to predict our economic future despite studying markets in depth, why ecosystems react in unintended and unknowable ways when we interfere with them despite deep study into how they work, why the immune system is so hard to control, etc.
I’m not making this stuff up. Complexity theory is a real thing, and is being studied by a lot of big name scientists. Go check out the Santa Fe Institute’s web site for more references if you actually desire to learn about it.
So, to summarize, the soul (in your model) is not really a person - it’s more the strata the person is printed on. It’s the paper to a book and molecules to a (physical) person. And when the person dies the soul is recycled into a clean, fresh, new soul that retains nothing at all of the person it was, and then it’s stuck back into an alternate-timeline version of the person it was to do the whole thing again. This process repeats infinitely with no advancement, development, or improvement of any kind happening to the soul - the only thing this time travel/alternate timeline business does for us is prevent the (personality-free) soul from ever being starting to exist or ever ceasing to exist.
Is that an accurate summary of your model?
If so, there’s a problem. Specifically, your model doesn’t prevent the soul from having a start and an end. And since that’s literally the only thing your model is trying to do, that’s a pretty big problem.
This is because you don’t have a proper time loop - you have alternate timelines instead. So instead of being diagrammed as a closed loop with no start or end, when the soul “goes back in time” it’s actually just hopping sideways to a different timeline. The soul never reconnects with itself and becomes the self-of-the-past, which means that its existence is a line, not a loop. This can be shown by the fact that at every point along the line we can track the number to times the soul has “died” - and even if you don’t know what that number is, you know that it’s one greater after each death/rebirth that happens.
Any time you are able to track the number of times an event has happened, that means that at one time the number of times that even has happened was zero. At some point the soul had never “died” and jumped to a new timeline - and if you look at the moment of the birth of that lifetime, before that point the soul didn’t exist at all.
As for whether the soul will ever come to an end, it’s true that your model allows for the possibility of the soul doing its live-die-reset-rewind dance without end. But you don’t need to rewind to do that; all you need is a soul that doesn’t expire with death. There is no particular reason to assume that time will ever stop, so an undying soul could in theory exist endlessly in normal time, floating through the emptiness of the expired universe forever. It would be boring, sure, but in your model souls have no minds or identities of significance anyway.
I don’t mean to threadshit, but wouldn’t it make just as much sense to believe that our souls (whatever they are) eventually end up in Russell’s teapot orbiting around the sun?
It seems to me that the odds of my existing are so remote that I could only exist if I’m meant to exist due to the actions of a higher being, or a simulation, or we always exist in some form(reincarnation). I believe Carl Sagan also had a hypothesis that if we have an oscillating universe, then the universe keeps on dying and being reborn, and so do we, although not the same way each time. If the correct model is that of a multiverse, then I should always exist, because somewhere among those infinite possibilities I exist.
But there’s no way to know. Obviously, if you don’t win the “lottery of life” and get born, you aren’t around to speculate.
The odds of winning the lottery are extremely remote, but it’s a certainty that someone somewhere will eventually win the money. To that person, it will look like a miracle.
Then there’s the anthropic principle - If the universe didn’t turn out exactly the way it did, you wouldn’t be here to wonder at its existence in the first place.
The problem with quoting Sagan is that he has been dead for a long time, but physics moves on. Sagan was a scientist in the era when we still debated whether the universe was open or closed, and a closed universe would collapse back into a ‘big crunch’. The oscillating universe was an offshoot idea of that theory.
Since the discovery of Dark Energy, we no longer believe that possibility. The current model says that the universe exploded in a big bang, that it may be either much, much bigger than the part we can see (or even infinite in size), and that it will continue to expand as entropy does its inevitable thing and eventually it will all just come to a big dead end of undifferentiated subatomic particles with no information content left at all.
Maybe, maybe not. Complexity theory suggests that we are not just the result of randomness, but of complex evolutionary processes that are utterly, mathematically unrepeatable due to chaos and sensitivity to initial conditions. On the other hand, this field is in its infancy, so we have a lot yet to learn.
The same could be said for any specific grain of sand.
Oh, I get the problem, it doesn’t matter how long the odds are if you can’t notice if it DOESN’T happen. But if we are in a simulation, then all of a sudden the odds go from infinitesmally small to a certainty. Same goes for multiple universe theory. Infinite possibilities means you always exist somewhere.
If they cannot influence you(and/or vice versa), and one cannot even detect the existence of any other(s) then they might as well not exist. We are puddles assuming that we are special because we fit the holes we inhabit.
Marcus Flavius, do you believe this or is this a model you devised and found appealing, even sensible to you, but it is only a thought experiment to discuss and defend?
I ask because, the validity of the concept aside, if you believe this to be true I’m curious as to why. Believing in such a concept is distinct from thinking it is intriguing or that it fulfills some personal need.
If you had introduced the concept with “wouldn’t this be a good explanation of our existence “ or “here’s an intriguing idea to kick around” then that would be a different discussion. But it seems you believe this. Correct me if I’m wrong.
If so, why? Even if it fulfills some need and comports with how you would like the world to be, why do you believe this actually is the case?
You guys know he’s getting this from Nietzsche, right?
I don’t believe this view is a perfect representation of reality, but I do believe it to be much closer to reality than the ‘linear view’.
I think this view holds up when you take higher dimensional theory into account. We cannot see future moments ‘coming’, nor see past moments which have ‘past’, but this is only because they are presently not in our field or awareness, which is limited to the present moment. The past moments still exist, but our awareness has ‘past them by’. Similarly, future moments also exist but our awareness has not crossed them yet. Applying this to one’s life leads us to the conclusion of a ‘cyclical’ existence.
Nietzsche proposed a theory of ‘eternal recurrence.’ But for him, it was purely a thought experiment. He was not attempting to describe any workings of the universe.
Do I believe this existence is all that there is? No, and I would seriously question the sanity of anyone who does?
Do I know how we got here and what lies beyond? No, and I don’t really give a damn. If gods, there be, I bet they wonder why the world they gave us isn’t enough for us, and we have to create magical sky pixies.