I may not be correctly understanding Gödel’s theorem, but I believe that it applies to discussions of this nature.
As we are inside a system, it is impossible for us to fully understand certain things about that system.
Also, the question could be unanswerable due to the limits of our mind. For instance, we cannot think in greater than 3 dimensions. I remember spending the better part of a period of Algebra II trying to picture a tesseract after having read Cosmos… 
Consider this: It is impossible for “nothing” to exist. Nothing, by definition, is the absence of anything. If nothing existed, then what was classified as ‘nothing’ would, in fact, be something because it exists.
Nothingness isn’t so much a state or condition, but more of a description of the absence of something.
Since Polerius will not be happy until he has a name for where the universe is located, I suggest it is located in the Abyss.
[sup]Abyss in this case should be confined to the definition of an immeasurably deep void. But even then a special definition of void would have to be invented since unoccupied and empty infer that space is involved. And so does “deep”.[/sup] :smack:
Thanks goes out to pervert for actually helping me get my mind around this subject, by taking toadspittle’s set of 1,2,3,4,5 and increasing the space between the numbers rather than adding 6,7,8 and 9. With that I can picture the numbers representing matter/energy remaining constant and only the space expanding.
I would add that Polerius should give his mind a rest and let the concept sink in. I’m sure he understands what is being said, he just doesn’t accept it. I spent years thinking the Big Bang was a load of crap, now I accept it, at least until something better comes along. 
[sup]But I’m not going to come up with it.[/sup]
Ah. You mean using your humanoid brain with its limitation of perception of matter and 4 dimensions of x, y, z, and time? Or you mean within the context of “beyond-humanoid-brain”, where there is more than matter and N dimensions, where N is not only 4, but much greater than 4? Are you sure there is such a thing as “All of our Universe”? Could there be something beyond “All”
It seems that since Einstein, our brain can conceive no more than 4 dimensions. By asking "where are we? and “All of our universe” --aAre you thinking 4-dimentional? or N-dimentional where N can be anywhere from 4 to infinity? What if there are other things in the “bigger universe” than matter and waves. Things that the current stage of human brain has not evolved enough to perceive?
Why do you insist for explanation of all, when the human brain in 2004 may not be at a stage to understand “the explanation”. Even if there was a perceivable explanation or an answer to your question, maybe it requires a human brain of the year 2,000,004 to begin to understand it, rather than Polerius brain of the year 2004.
I suggest you come down to earth, in 2004, and to the United States of America, and try to define “where are we” or what should be our “national interest”. Should we even have a “national interest” (4 dimensions), or should we have a “global interest” (more than 4 dimensions)? What should be our Foreign Policy within those dimensions? or, simply, what is our Foreign Policy Now? If Democracy and Freedom are part of it, let’s define those terms, and let’s see whether we have one definition for ourselves, and another definition for others.
Frankly, if we cannot answer in 2004 “where are we?” and where we are going in the coming US elections, then we have no business (nor the brain capacity) to perceive “where are we” in the grand universe, for thousands or millions of years from now.
As I said in the OP
So, when I started this thread I didn’t think someone would come up with The Answer, and I didn’t really want an explanation of the current scientific theory of spacetime, I just wanted to see if others have struggled with this question (or similar ones) and see what they came up with.
Within a probability distribution.
Breathe a big sigh of relief. I’ve got your answers. And they are remarkably simple.
I think the Big Bang theory is basically right, but it needn’t be in order for this explanation to work. Imagine that we go back before the Big Bang existed.
As you have pointed out, Polerius, there is no space or time. What is there? Only those truths that could not be otherwise, that require no one to be cognizant of them for them to be true. The value of pi. That 1 + 1 = 2. And every truth that could possibly be derived from these and infinite others. I speak of the laws of pattern.
No, they weren’t written down in books. There were not even any minds in which they were known as thoughts. There was no “God” who made them. They were uncreated necessities.
There was no mind to say yes or no. There were no barriers to potential, no walls. When we think of the Big Bang, we think of a mind-shattering explosion, something that would make a supernova seem like a firecracker. The image is apt. This was pure potential lashing out, erupting, becoming…
one of a near-infinite number of coherent patterns, or worlds.
But the nature of those worlds did not change when they came into being. They came from pattern, and they still are pattern. And all patterns are still located in the same place. To answer your question, Where are we?–
We are still in that zone of pure potential. Call it the One of Plotinus, call Brahman, like the Hindus. Call it the Universal Mind. All things are there. You can see and feel this place if you meditate, as you go beyond the chatter of your consciousness and experience the Sat-Chit-Ananda (being-consciousness-bliss) whereof the Hindus have spoken for millenia.
The space and time we experience are merely the form that our great pattern, the Universe, has taken. The interface of our experience, the body/mind sees them as big, expanded, and having a “spot”–just as the interface of a video game, the screen, creates a “spot” for the code that itself has no particular physical or temporal dimensions.
BTW, I wanted to clarify something. Space is not “nothing.” It has many properties. It can be bent by gravity, it can contain objects, it allows light to pass through it at speed c, etc. etc.
In fact “nothing” can never be objectified. It is always a relationship between one thing and another.
Some good answers all around - personally, my hat would tip to Wake Up Call for the answer most similar to the one I’d propose.
Let us ask: If the universe was such that somewhere within it, matter was configured into a kind of process called an ‘organism’, and that those organisms developed into an incredibly complex kind of ‘computer’ which sorted sensory input into memory moderated by chemical emotion such that it could label those inputs using something called ‘language’, what then could be said about those computers?
Perhaps this would be reasonable: That language could clearly only be an approximation of the universe, and would clearly be limited by the particular region they happened to inhabit.
“Where” is a word relating to their location within 3 dimensions of space. “When” is a word relating to their location in one dimension of time. And so they might try and ask “Where are those dimensions?”, or “When did time begin?”.
Now, there might be answers to the spirit of those questions, but perhaps not to the letter, due to the approximate nature of that language. One might say that there are 2 dimensional or 4 dimensional (or 11, or N dimensional) regions of the universe which we cannot yet (or perhaps ever) detect. One might say that time only exists in this region, and that the one end of our region of the universe (called the “Big Bang” even though it wasn’t Big and it wasn’t a Bang) is timeless, such that it has always existed.
Either way what is important is that, as other have pointed out, these questions would necessarily be very difficult for those 3-D temporal computers using approximate language to ask, let alone answer.
And when I say ‘language’, I do not necessarily mean ‘English’. The relationship between the language I am think of and the universe was best described by one of the ‘highest spec’ computers yet produced by the universe:
Good question and good answers. My answer to the question would be - We are right here. Then I would walk rapidly away and not take any follow-ups.
Ooh! Oooh! Me! Meeeee!
A good part of the conundrum you are dealing with, Polerius, is that we only understand location at all in relative terms.
Where are you? On top of the mountain.
Where is the mountain? (You didn’t say, so I will make a location up) The mountain is just west of Denver.
Where is Denver? In the middle of Colorado.
Where is Colorado? In the Western third of the United States.
Where is the United States? In the middle of North America.
Where is North America? X miles (you said you didn’t want coordinates) northwest of the point where the Equator and the Prime Meridian cross on the surface of the Earth.
Where is the Earth? Travellling around the sun in a low-eccentricity elliptical orbit at a certain disance.
Where is the Sun? Travelling in a path around the core of the Milky Way Galaxy, currently making its way through one of the dense spiral arms.
Up to this point, we have had an easy time locating or inventing a reference point from which we could measure our distance. On the surface of the Earth, it’s a matter of geography. Once our questions take us off the surface of the Earth, it’s a mattter of gravity and motion.
From this point forward however, decent reference points are hard to come by.
The only meaningful feature the next scale up is the Local Group, a bunch of galaxies (the big spirals The Milky Way, The Andromeda, The Triangulum, and a bunch of smaller ellipticals and irregulars around them out to a certain incomprehensible distance) close enough to each other that local gravity affects their apparent motion relative to us more than cosmological redshift does. They are a very definite group, but because there is nothing but the galaxies to define the Local Group, and they are all in some kind of motion relative to each other, a definite meaningful point to use as a reference begins to become futile.
Answering the question, Where is the Local Group? simply magnifies the problem. We can describe our distance from the Virgo Cluster, the nearest somewhat large cluster of glaxies, and so on and so forth, and I could continue the astronomy lesson, but once we get to trying to place the galaxy in context with the rest of the universe, we must eventually throw up our hands and admit that the relative motions of all the galaxies make it more or less useless to understand our “location” in a way that is meaningful to us.
And really, if you look back at your local scales, you realize that all the reference points that seemd so definite are all in motion as well. Denver and the mountain near it circle the center of the Earth each day, The Earth moves in its orbit, the moves in ITS orbit. So location is really only meaningful in a very local context.
OK, then, if we accept that our location WITHIN the universe is somewhat hard to pin down, at least with any sense of permanence, surely we can locate the Universe within whatever it might be within.
Trouble there is that we have no idea of what the Universe might exist within, which brings us to the realm of theoretical physics.
Scientists in the last several decades trying to understand why, for instance, the electron has the specific charge it does or the gravitational constant is precisely what it is have liked what they have seen when, instead of thinking of the universe being made up of masses of inteacting particles, they think of the universe being made up of tangles of interacting vibrating strings instead.
Trouble is, the strings can vibrate in a way that makes the universe look like it does only if the universe has about 10 dimensions of space and time for them to wiggle around in, as opposed to the four we’ve noticed up to now.
Various scientists try to explain their way around this in various ways. One way is to realize that while a string would be basically a one-dimensional entity in this 10-dimensional context, you could also imagine entities of more than one dimension wobbling around as well. These have acquired the name p-branes. In this line of thinking, the Universe is a four-dimensional p-brane in the 10-dimensional model.
Cool! parallel planes of reality! So where is the Universe stacked up relative to all the others?
Not so fast. One popular hypothesis of the last few years has it that the p-branes themselves are all in motion relative to each other, and that the Big Bang occurred when some other p-brane smashed into the one that defines our Universe. No universal reference point once again.
I suggest to you, therefore, that location is ulimtately an illusion, and that motion relative to something else is the only reality. Thus you may relax on the mountaintop, and contemplate, zen-like, that while you take not a single step, you are on a great journey.
Only in semantic terms, Frank. It is possible to imagine a state of affairs where there is no universe, no physical matter or energy, no time or space, certainly no minds to ponder any of these questions – and that’s not what we’ve got. Why is that? If we can ever answer that question, that might also give us the answer to Polerius’ question.
I think people need to be a bit more careful with their assertions that “X is beyond human understanding” or “X cannot be grasped at a ‘gut’ level.” It’s difficult for people to imagine things that are beyond their experience, but the human mind is flexible. Familiarity breeds ease. I certainly feel I have a gut-level understanding of the idea that the universe isn’t located anywhere. If viewed as a whole, then how could it be?
It is possible that there does exist some larger space within that which we think of as the universe has a definite location. We shouldn’t prejudge the question. It is possible that the universe might be somewhere, and it is equally possible that it simply might not. In such a case, this larger space would be more significant than our universe from a philosophical point of view. In my opinion, it makes more sense for the term “universe” to be taken to include all that stands in a physical relationship to us.
Taken in this sense, the universe is a self-consistent and closed whole. Even if “open” in the geometrical sense of being infinite, it is closed in the sense that it has no exterior. There’s nothing more complicated about the situation than that. The universe doesn’t exist within an infinite amount of nothingness, because nothingness doesn’t exist. An infinite amount of nothing is the same as no nothing at all.
Nothing needs to have a location. Location is not a logically necessary property of mere existence. The notions of space, time, and location only have meaning within spaces which satisfy certain axioms. In our mathematics there are spaces that do not satisfy them, and there are things which are not spaces at all. The number “2” could be said to be located between “1” and “3” on the number line, but the great rhombicosidodecahedron has no location in the conventional sense. Our universe could be more akin to the latter than to the former (though I recognize this comparison is pretty strained).
I understand that this can be difficult to visualize. It isn’t the sort of thing one could draw a picture of, but our imaginations aren’t limited to just pictures. Just don’t try to imagine the outside, because there isn’t one!
I think time is a barrier; it can be difficult to picture something standing truly alone if it keeps evolving and changing. I find it helps me to think of time as merely another dimension akin to a space dimension. Time points at right angles to the three dimensions of space with which we are familiar and has a relationship to them slightly different from that which they bear to one another.
This point of view is physically justified. In relativity, the behavior of tachyons (faster-than-light-particles) in a space with three dimensions of time and one of space is precisely the same as the behavior of tardyons (ordinary slower-than-light particles) in a space with three dimensions of space and one of time, save for a physically meaningless change of coordinates. Time only has its uniquely time-like properties because it is different from the space dimensions.
A one-dimensional universe that expanded and then collapsed might look something like a sphere; perhaps elongated, perhaps not, according to the exact details of the situation. This is a sphere, not a ball: there is nothing outside its surface; no interior or exterior. Modifying this so it expands indefinitely is trivial. Since we’re no good at thinking in more than three dimensions, this is as good a model for our universe as any.
I either don’t understand or I don’t agree… While I agree that it is possible to imagine such a state, I don’t see how it could exist. Perhaps the problem is caused by trying to describe something the language wasn’t intended to describe.
Best answer yet. You can only be where you are and no one but yourself.
Yep. Like I said, we’re within a probability distribution.