Engage in the thought experiment that you are/were/will be every human for a sec. Is self-harm morally ok? Many would say yes. So "the egg" already gives those people a pass to hurt everyone else in this world because it's a form of self-harm. Great. Now for those who explicitly don't want to self-harm. "The egg" implies that your rebirths happen serially in meta-time. You live this life, then the next, then another,... those lives may overlap on earth, but in egg-time, they don't. This means you can statistically expect you've already lived 50% of them. There's no guarantee of this, but the distribution is normal, not uniform [1] (similar reasoning found in doomsday argument [2]). 50%, give or take, humans out there you've already been. Everything you do to them, you do to your PAST self. You're not only absolved of moral accountability, but also of the physical consequences of treating them horribly. So while "the egg" tries to do the opposite, it really seems to justify psycho maxxing.
Everyone is hung up on the self-harm thing. This thought experiment is bigger than what most people give it credit for, in fact one could say this is the be all end all of thought experiments because the question factors in things like quantum physics, consciousness, determinism, etc. You could go up your own theoretical butthole with the kinds of philosophical extrapolations through this rabbit hole (so to speak).
Self-harm isn't moral or amoral, it just is. It's as moral or amoral as deciding if you should or shouldn't eat another animal (yes, this includes humans -- Donner party anyone?).
Life isn't black and white. Where I've landed with this thought experiment through my own meditations and readings is that the universe/reality is a recursive fractal of spectrums within spectrums.
And this is just scratching the surface of this stuff.
2. Who says the living of lives does not repeat over time? Your/our "next" life may start in 300 B.C.
Two things science knows barely something about: consciousness and the arrow of time. The self is only an illusion. Physics has lots of symmetry. Therefore, it would make sense if the universe was fair in the end. So the egg theory actually makes sense, more sense than anything else I've heard actually.
Re 2, yes and in 300 BC you're also expected to already have been 50% alive there.
Your egg can't explain consciousness or the arrow of time either. How is the person in egg limbo, the fetus being developed I mean, conscious? How does the egg limbo work at all? You're gonna need a big hand to wave the (meta-)physics of your little egg universe away.
I'm not pretending to have solved the hard problem of consciousness. I just said what so far seems most likely to me, despite there being still many open questions, in many other theories as well.
The thing that makes harming others wrong is the lack of consent. That allows us to avoid the sticky question of what is "harm." For self-harm, consent implied, what is "harm?" Exercise with a risk of injury? Failing to exercise, with a risk of decreased life span? Failing to optimize your exercise routine? Surgery? Drinking alcohol? Dating the wrong person?
The situation described in The Egg replaces morality with a direct reason not to harm others, because you are the person who will suffer because of it. So if you're complaining that the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality, my response is: Yes. That's part of what makes it an interesting story.
As for the meta-time thing, functional decision theory [1] solves this. The application is particularly clean because your memories are erased between lives. There's no factor of 2 free lunch from temporal ordering.
> The situation described in The Egg replaces morality with a direct reason not to harm others, because you are the person who will suffer because of it.
Or you've already been said person, in which case it won't harm you anymore. Not to mention that it's inevitable that you will hurt the victim because it already happened from the victim's POV, who you've already been. The egg is in a fundamentally contradictory realm anyway because it's asserting free will and same-universe time travel at the same time.
> the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality
Allowing for psycho maxxing, yes. You can take "I should be a good person" from it, but so far you haven't made a compelling case. There's no reason why you shouldn't be an exploiter in 1-10% of your lives, living off the direct and indirect suffering of the 90%. Kind of like within a modern life you can choose to suffer 90% of the time (work, gym, studying,...) to get a halfway decent 10%.
Assuming the premise of the short story is true, of course. Otherwise, what's the point. I can't simultaneously grant the premise and pretend that I didn't just grant it, by denying my knowledge of the rebirth mechanism.
What is moral? It is not a law of the universe. It is a subjective and culture-defined human construct. It is very ineffective to try and understand metaphysics through the ever-shifting lens of morality.
I probably should have phrased it "do you have a moral right to self-harm"? The starting point is usually that you're allowed to do anything you want, total freedom, and then we blacklist everything we deem immoral. You don't have an explicit license to breathe either, it's just not blacklisted, not by your gov, nor morally. As far as I can tell, many people refuse to morally blacklist self-harm, because there's no victim other than the perpetrator. This is doubly true in the egg scenario where you are also everyone who suffers any secondary harm from the self-harm, like also being every saddened family member. To make a long story short, I'm not asking about goodness of anything here, "ok" just means "granted."
I love both of these, and I wonder why would I need mainstream religion when stories like these are deep enough to provide answers, hope and meaning for those who seek it. If the message resonates with you, why not adopt it? Nobody could ever prove they’re just fantasy.
Sorry for the digression, I’m just an atheist with a love for philosophy and spirituality.
I’m not against, I’m just saying one can find answers to the deep questions of life without having to buy into religion wholesale. No one ever told me this was even an option, especially due to the toxic discourse around atheism and Christianity by Americans that have poisoned the conversation for everybody else (quelle surprise…)
Conviction influences behavior. You can believe whatever you want: and we believe things based on experience, and personal knowledge. And we 'stick' to those beliefs for certain reasons.
There is a friction to being pushed into believing something else: read up on Plato's 'Allegory of the Cave' for an idea of what I'm talking about.
Your own personal beliefs can become a religion if you start to shape your life around it: that is, you start thinking of, and living by, principles or guidelines that affect your behavior. The stories offer up core ideas or beliefs, but no principles or guidelines to live by.
If you find the story interesting, and don't form rigid guidelines or rules to live by: then perhaps you've just been influenced in a positive way, a way that resonates with you.
The problem with conviction, is when people try to force it onto others. It's something that has to be grown from within.
Unlike the other religions, "The Egg" doesn't impose morals or pretend to be an infallible historical record, prophet of things to come, or explainer of the universe. It's just a cute philosophical story that exists entirely within the imagination to make us feel better and less lost.
That is to say, it just lacks the same "baggage" of the others.
It is the hypothesis that all observers are actually manifestations of a single observer experiencing all of time, space, and every point of view. All world lines across spacetime are parts of one single line "like a huge tangled knot" traced out by the one observer.
I'd go further and say this isn't just a hypothesis, it's the actual nature of reality. Any subjective experience is always mine and now for all observers, for all times. No subject has ever experienced or will experience reality any other way. The screen is the same no matter what movie is playing on it.
Arnold Zuboff makes a case for this in "One Self: The Logic of Experience" (Inquiry, 1990) [0]. He calls it universalism: there has only ever been one subject of experience.
One of his thought experiments: imagine a meteorite is about to wipe out all life around you right now, instantly. If this exact experience - being you, here, thinking this - is instantiated anywhere else in the universe, it will continue there without any gaps.
Hindu mystics were already exploring and articulating these non-dual concepts in great detail thousands of years ago, in the Upanishads. As Robert Jastrow would say:
"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
Thanks for the article, reading it now, good stuff. Exactly the same idea, that there is a single subject across the space of all experiences. Apparently another name for it is Open Individualism, on which I commented here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49786470
Thanks, that article summarizes many of the references that people (the one "I") brought up in this thread.
> Open individualism is a view within philosophy of self, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times; in the past, present and future.
> From this perspective reincarnation in the common sense isn't true, but rather it is that people are already reincarnated as everything because no one is traveling.
---
Andy Weir - The Egg (2009)
Arnold Zuboff - One self: The logic of experience (1990)
> The apparent boundaries of persons are as illusory as those in brain bisection; personal identity remains unchanged through any variation or multiplication of body or mind. In all conscious life there is only one person - I - whose existence depends merely on the presence of a quality that is inherent in all experience: its quality of being mine.
> Any conscious being would necessarily have been you anyway.
Leo Tolstoy - Esarhaddon, King of Assyria (1903)
> ..An old man appears before Esarhaddon and takes the king through a process where he experiences, from a first-person perspective, the lives of humans and non-human animals he has tormented. This reveals to him that he is everyone and that by harming others, he is actually harming himself.
Fred Hoyle - October the First Is Too Late (1966)
> Hoyle puts forward the "pigeon hole theory" which asserts that "each moment of time can be thought of as a pre-existing pigeon hole" and the pigeon hole currently being examined by your consciousness is the present and that the spotlight of consciousness does not have to move in a linear fashion; it could potentially move around in any order.
> There might be one set of pigeon holes for each person, but only one spotlight, which would mean that the "consciousness could be the same".
---
From Chandogya Upanishad (8th to 6th century BCE), in the dialogue between Uddalaka and his son Śvetaketu.
Bring a banyan fruit.
Here it is, sir.
Cut it up.
I've cut it up, sir.
What do you see here?
These quite tiny seeds, sir.
Now, take one of them and cut it up.
I've cut it up, sir.
What do you see there?
Nothing, sir.
> This finest essence here, son, that you can't even see — look how on account of that finest essence this huge banyan tree stands here.
> Believe, my son: the finest essence here — that constitutes the self of this whole world; that is the truth; that is the self (ātman). And that's how you are, Śvetaketu.
If you subscribe the the many worlds interpretation, you can basically look at observers as existing within the space of eigenvalues of operators acting on the massively entangled wave function of their respective universe.
Christianity (Catholicism) derived this as well. John Scotus Eriugena in the 800s.
Apocatastasis
The thesis goes something like: God is timeless. Time is necessary for change. In order to experience change, God creates universes that have time and descends into these lower states of existence. This gives rise to conscious beings - they’re literally small disconnected slices of God that descended to our state of existence. When you die, you “roll up” back into God taking your lived experience with you.
He was posthumously condemned in 1225 with an order for his books to be burned.
I'm no theologian but I don't really think this coheres with standard Catholic doctrine. Typically, we say that God is being itself, pure and uncaused. All things maintain their very existence through God. We know that God has intellect because the world we reside in is intelligible. God has no need to experience change or time because he actualizes their very existence, and in order to do so, must already have perfect knowledge of it. Humans, even our souls, are created beings and are not any more a part of God than anything else that exists. Jesus was unique in that he was a hypostatic union of human nature and divine nature, and even though he was an indivisible union, these natures nevertheless remained distinct.
Edit: I wrote this response before you added that this was specific to the theology of John Scotus Eriugena.
Yes. He was posthumously condemned in 1225 with an order for his books to be burned. When his works resurfaced in the 1600s, he was added to the banned books index.
Edit: Ah, yeah, this was just one thinker. Early catholic thought is diverse and fascinating. A lot of work went into reconciling religion (and the rest of society really) with the “science” of the time. There is a lot of fun exploratory work trying to reconcile Catholicism with other philosophies, only some of which became cannon. It’s one of the reasons why the scientific revolution was so jarring for all of society - it threw thousands of years of convergent philosophy across society into a paradigm shift when we were forced to abandon things like the 4 element theory.
It's easy to imagine making all the exact same decisions as someone else, if you were born into their body and lived their experiences.
A decision is a reaction from an observer: and it requires information and feedback. Is the thing that decides special? Is it the same thing as everyone else's?
If you can imagine it, does it make it more likely? Only time tells.
Wow, dammit! That syndrome of "something you always wondered or thought only you thought already having a name" strikes again!
My intuition for all sentience between "fragments" of a single consciousness from outside the universe was that, if Free Will™ is real, then true randomness can only come from outside a system..
I always loved this as it seems to be a more modern way of interpreting the monad. Could it not be the case that all particles are actually just one thing that is not subject to time and that our reality is a snapshot of a matrix of its different potentials?
it's important to realize that very few physicists accept that idea
right up there with everything that will happen in the universe has already happened and it's just a matter of zooming out on the entire time dimension (some use that idea to explain "spooky action at a distance" quantum entanglement and the quantum eraser)
but I love how wikipedia even links the PBS Space Time about it
Complications vs simplifications was a restatement of Occam’s razor as you assuredly know and knew. However complications added can be doors to other hidden processes that are simply poorly understood or observe. The increase in complications isn’t necessarily a pure gradient, it can indicate where more interesting questions lie.
In this specific case experimental evidence shows it’s almost certainly not true. It was less the complications that killed it than objective observation.
Gotta admit, that is probably my favorite Wikipedia article. It reads like a conversation between two stoned teenagers (which, admittedly, a lot of cosmology and quantum physics do, to non-physicists like myself).
Even if there were as many positrons as electrons in the universe, I don't get the time-reversed character at a macro level. When leaving antimatter out of the picture, I dimly understand that the arrow of the arises from entropy. If time reversed particles are antiparticles, shouldn't we sometimes see a diffuse cloud of antiparticles in a lab spontaneously condense into a very low entropy concentrated configuration?
The answer is that they don’t literally go backwards in time showing reverse causality. They are representable in QFT by reversing the time component of their counterpart, which doesn’t impact how they interact with broader causality, just their internal configuration. Further - this does not play out in the lab as reversed causality even between anti particles. You can collide two positrons then detect them later at their destinations just fine in normal causality. It’s a shame because it would be really sweet to find some reversal of entropy and causality somewhere or somehow!
You may, but if you read the link, you’ll find it consistent with the second law of thermodynamics despite being clever about it. The demonstration of consistency requires a modern understanding of information theory, but it’s been long realized it’s likely not a real “out.”
_We_ are still traveling forwards in time. If you followed a cloud of antiparticles backwards in time along its direction of travel, then you would see entropy decrease yes, though regular particles would do the same if we followed them back in time.
My thought is that if there's only one electron, then its probabilistic location at a place and a time, should be impacted by its own energy across all places and times. That quantum gravity comes from generalizing the Schrodinger's equation to include these energies in the phase of the wave function, causing the phase to skew and the probability to update towards the location of large mass/energies.
Space and time are illusions. So probably true in some sense...There is probably no electron at all...I mean, one would be quite arbitrary, why not two?
Human language is poorly-suited for describing a coherent universe because you can construct all sorts of incoherent propositions (e.g. "what existed before time"/"what exists outside of reality" etc etc); philosophies/faiths have struggled with this for millennia.
Then wouldn't it be "one-photon"? I've heard (but don't fully understand) that massed particles are simply photons trapped in toroidal vortices, which gives them an outward charge field and lets them interact with the Higgs. Annihilation supposedly just being untangling the toroid.
Maybe you could disprove it by observing a electron/positron pair being created and then annihilating each other, forming a closed loop that couldn't be part of the single path traced by a single particle.
IANP, but Ive always thought you should be able to observe reverse causality in a positron if true. That’s the primary effect of going backwards in time - a reverse in entropy.
The other side of the theory is the positron hidden in the proton. I assume a particle collider should be able to falsify this.
But it turns out antimatter isn’t supposed to actually move backwards in time but follows the same causality as everything else. It’s just that they represent their matter pairs configuration mathematically by reversing the time orientation. This isn’t super obvious but it’s very much different than going backwards in time literally. Sad!
This is yet another case where a layman-written wiki article about physics is highly confusing to other laypeople, because it only tells you half the story. Particularly because it seems to be based on a chapter of Feynman's popular science book. But the book actually goes on and points out how Feynman immediately dismissed Wheeler's hypothesis, because the universe contains a lot more electrons than positrons. You'd have to explain that imbalance first if you want to entertain this line of thought.
As a layperson myself - how can we tell that a distant celestial object is not made from antimatter? Afaik, it doesn't behave differently from matter, other than it annihilates on contact.
Also even if we could, that would only describe the practically and theoretically observable universe, which doesn't rule out other places looking very different (on its own)
Because distant celestial objects accelerate a lot of matter away from them as parts of different processes. For example if there were a sizeable chunk of space were antimatter than at the edge of this space there would be a constant glow of annihilation. We don't see that anywhere (well except things like quasars doing this at small scales.
So, yea, it would have to be outside the observable universe in which that means we can do no empirical science on it therefore it not being real to us.
Dark matter represents far more of the universe than 'light' matter by volume if our physics is correct, so by that most galaxies are mostly dark matter by default. We have found a few very small ones that don't seem to be.
With this said dark matter still influences the curvature of space time so its not completely invisible. We could see a dark galaxy because it would alter the images of galaxies behind it with things like Einstein rings and crosses.
Yea, it's really more about the fact that all electrons are exactly the same regardless of the level of precision we look at them. It would be like if we found another earth and that earth was the exact same earth. Not earth like, not very close to earth. The exact same earth down to the smallest fundamental level.
Black hole, or singularity? Black hole describes the event horizon and singularity describes the point like object that would exist in a non-rotating black hole.
In the line, I recommend „The Egg” by Andy Weir https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
Engage in the thought experiment that you are/were/will be every human for a sec. Is self-harm morally ok? Many would say yes. So "the egg" already gives those people a pass to hurt everyone else in this world because it's a form of self-harm. Great. Now for those who explicitly don't want to self-harm. "The egg" implies that your rebirths happen serially in meta-time. You live this life, then the next, then another,... those lives may overlap on earth, but in egg-time, they don't. This means you can statistically expect you've already lived 50% of them. There's no guarantee of this, but the distribution is normal, not uniform [1] (similar reasoning found in doomsday argument [2]). 50%, give or take, humans out there you've already been. Everything you do to them, you do to your PAST self. You're not only absolved of moral accountability, but also of the physical consequences of treating them horribly. So while "the egg" tries to do the opposite, it really seems to justify psycho maxxing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
Everyone is hung up on the self-harm thing. This thought experiment is bigger than what most people give it credit for, in fact one could say this is the be all end all of thought experiments because the question factors in things like quantum physics, consciousness, determinism, etc. You could go up your own theoretical butthole with the kinds of philosophical extrapolations through this rabbit hole (so to speak).
Self-harm isn't moral or amoral, it just is. It's as moral or amoral as deciding if you should or shouldn't eat another animal (yes, this includes humans -- Donner party anyone?).
Life isn't black and white. Where I've landed with this thought experiment through my own meditations and readings is that the universe/reality is a recursive fractal of spectrums within spectrums.
And this is just scratching the surface of this stuff.
1. No, self harm is not ok.
2. Who says the living of lives does not repeat over time? Your/our "next" life may start in 300 B.C.
Two things science knows barely something about: consciousness and the arrow of time. The self is only an illusion. Physics has lots of symmetry. Therefore, it would make sense if the universe was fair in the end. So the egg theory actually makes sense, more sense than anything else I've heard actually.
Re 1, why?
Re 2, yes and in 300 BC you're also expected to already have been 50% alive there.
Your egg can't explain consciousness or the arrow of time either. How is the person in egg limbo, the fetus being developed I mean, conscious? How does the egg limbo work at all? You're gonna need a big hand to wave the (meta-)physics of your little egg universe away.
I'm not pretending to have solved the hard problem of consciousness. I just said what so far seems most likely to me, despite there being still many open questions, in many other theories as well.
The thing that makes harming others wrong is the lack of consent. That allows us to avoid the sticky question of what is "harm." For self-harm, consent implied, what is "harm?" Exercise with a risk of injury? Failing to exercise, with a risk of decreased life span? Failing to optimize your exercise routine? Surgery? Drinking alcohol? Dating the wrong person?
Most of your examples would not be considered harm for another...
The situation described in The Egg replaces morality with a direct reason not to harm others, because you are the person who will suffer because of it. So if you're complaining that the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality, my response is: Yes. That's part of what makes it an interesting story.
As for the meta-time thing, functional decision theory [1] solves this. The application is particularly clean because your memories are erased between lives. There's no factor of 2 free lunch from temporal ordering.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.05060
> The situation described in The Egg replaces morality with a direct reason not to harm others, because you are the person who will suffer because of it.
Or you've already been said person, in which case it won't harm you anymore. Not to mention that it's inevitable that you will hurt the victim because it already happened from the victim's POV, who you've already been. The egg is in a fundamentally contradictory realm anyway because it's asserting free will and same-universe time travel at the same time.
> the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality
Allowing for psycho maxxing, yes. You can take "I should be a good person" from it, but so far you haven't made a compelling case. There's no reason why you shouldn't be an exploiter in 1-10% of your lives, living off the direct and indirect suffering of the 90%. Kind of like within a modern life you can choose to suffer 90% of the time (work, gym, studying,...) to get a halfway decent 10%.
I don't think you're "absolved" if you don't know you're harming, in fact, yourself. Guilt is all about intention.
Assuming the premise of the short story is true, of course. Otherwise, what's the point. I can't simultaneously grant the premise and pretend that I didn't just grant it, by denying my knowledge of the rebirth mechanism.
What is moral? It is not a law of the universe. It is a subjective and culture-defined human construct. It is very ineffective to try and understand metaphysics through the ever-shifting lens of morality.
> Is self-harm morally ok?
Is self-harm ok? What could be considered good about it?
I probably should have phrased it "do you have a moral right to self-harm"? The starting point is usually that you're allowed to do anything you want, total freedom, and then we blacklist everything we deem immoral. You don't have an explicit license to breathe either, it's just not blacklisted, not by your gov, nor morally. As far as I can tell, many people refuse to morally blacklist self-harm, because there's no victim other than the perpetrator. This is doubly true in the egg scenario where you are also everyone who suffers any secondary harm from the self-harm, like also being every saddened family member. To make a long story short, I'm not asking about goodness of anything here, "ok" just means "granted."
That's such a great read.
Asimov's 'The Last Question' is another good one that's in line: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
I love both of these, and I wonder why would I need mainstream religion when stories like these are deep enough to provide answers, hope and meaning for those who seek it. If the message resonates with you, why not adopt it? Nobody could ever prove they’re just fantasy.
Sorry for the digression, I’m just an atheist with a love for philosophy and spirituality.
If you're going to be content with "nobody could ever prove it wrong", what do you have against mainstream religion?
Fantasy is fantasy. Either it's true to what's really there, or it isn't.
I’m not against, I’m just saying one can find answers to the deep questions of life without having to buy into religion wholesale. No one ever told me this was even an option, especially due to the toxic discourse around atheism and Christianity by Americans that have poisoned the conversation for everybody else (quelle surprise…)
Conviction influences behavior. You can believe whatever you want: and we believe things based on experience, and personal knowledge. And we 'stick' to those beliefs for certain reasons.
There is a friction to being pushed into believing something else: read up on Plato's 'Allegory of the Cave' for an idea of what I'm talking about.
Your own personal beliefs can become a religion if you start to shape your life around it: that is, you start thinking of, and living by, principles or guidelines that affect your behavior. The stories offer up core ideas or beliefs, but no principles or guidelines to live by.
If you find the story interesting, and don't form rigid guidelines or rules to live by: then perhaps you've just been influenced in a positive way, a way that resonates with you.
The problem with conviction, is when people try to force it onto others. It's something that has to be grown from within.
Unlike the other religions, "The Egg" doesn't impose morals or pretend to be an infallible historical record, prophet of things to come, or explainer of the universe. It's just a cute philosophical story that exists entirely within the imagination to make us feel better and less lost.
That is to say, it just lacks the same "baggage" of the others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI
(animated version)
I go against the grain and say that I dislike the egg. It is spiritually stupid and heretic and morally fake enlightened.
I don't know. I just read it now—my thought was that it was an interesting idea (thankfully now overly long).
"“Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”"
I think the word he was looking for was clichéd.
Amazing. So, I am most of you commenting here, and the author of this incredible short story. Thank [myself] for sharing!
A twist on this theory: One-Observer Universe.
It is the hypothesis that all observers are actually manifestations of a single observer experiencing all of time, space, and every point of view. All world lines across spacetime are parts of one single line "like a huge tangled knot" traced out by the one observer.
I'd go further and say this isn't just a hypothesis, it's the actual nature of reality. Any subjective experience is always mine and now for all observers, for all times. No subject has ever experienced or will experience reality any other way. The screen is the same no matter what movie is playing on it.
Arnold Zuboff makes a case for this in "One Self: The Logic of Experience" (Inquiry, 1990) [0]. He calls it universalism: there has only ever been one subject of experience.
One of his thought experiments: imagine a meteorite is about to wipe out all life around you right now, instantly. If this exact experience - being you, here, thinking this - is instantiated anywhere else in the universe, it will continue there without any gaps.
Hindu mystics were already exploring and articulating these non-dual concepts in great detail thousands of years ago, in the Upanishads. As Robert Jastrow would say:
"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
[0] https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/mind/1990-zuboff.pdf
Thanks for the article, reading it now, good stuff. Exactly the same idea, that there is a single subject across the space of all experiences. Apparently another name for it is Open Individualism, on which I commented here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49786470
I experienced that after smoking salvia
> A twist on this theory: One-Observer Universe.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_individualism
Thanks, that article summarizes many of the references that people (the one "I") brought up in this thread.
> Open individualism is a view within philosophy of self, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times; in the past, present and future.
> From this perspective reincarnation in the common sense isn't true, but rather it is that people are already reincarnated as everything because no one is traveling.
---
Andy Weir - The Egg (2009)
Arnold Zuboff - One self: The logic of experience (1990)
> The apparent boundaries of persons are as illusory as those in brain bisection; personal identity remains unchanged through any variation or multiplication of body or mind. In all conscious life there is only one person - I - whose existence depends merely on the presence of a quality that is inherent in all experience: its quality of being mine.
> Any conscious being would necessarily have been you anyway.
Leo Tolstoy - Esarhaddon, King of Assyria (1903)
> ..An old man appears before Esarhaddon and takes the king through a process where he experiences, from a first-person perspective, the lives of humans and non-human animals he has tormented. This reveals to him that he is everyone and that by harming others, he is actually harming himself.
Fred Hoyle - October the First Is Too Late (1966)
> Hoyle puts forward the "pigeon hole theory" which asserts that "each moment of time can be thought of as a pre-existing pigeon hole" and the pigeon hole currently being examined by your consciousness is the present and that the spotlight of consciousness does not have to move in a linear fashion; it could potentially move around in any order.
> There might be one set of pigeon holes for each person, but only one spotlight, which would mean that the "consciousness could be the same".
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From Chandogya Upanishad (8th to 6th century BCE), in the dialogue between Uddalaka and his son Śvetaketu.
> This finest essence here, son, that you can't even see — look how on account of that finest essence this huge banyan tree stands here.> Believe, my son: the finest essence here — that constitutes the self of this whole world; that is the truth; that is the self (ātman). And that's how you are, Śvetaketu.
If you subscribe the the many worlds interpretation, you can basically look at observers as existing within the space of eigenvalues of operators acting on the massively entangled wave function of their respective universe.
I think some branches of Buddhism derived this too.
Originally derived from Hinduism thousands of years before Buddha (see Advaita for a modern view and Upanishads or Gita/Vedas for source)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman
Christianity (Catholicism) derived this as well. John Scotus Eriugena in the 800s.
Apocatastasis
The thesis goes something like: God is timeless. Time is necessary for change. In order to experience change, God creates universes that have time and descends into these lower states of existence. This gives rise to conscious beings - they’re literally small disconnected slices of God that descended to our state of existence. When you die, you “roll up” back into God taking your lived experience with you.
He was posthumously condemned in 1225 with an order for his books to be burned.
I'm no theologian but I don't really think this coheres with standard Catholic doctrine. Typically, we say that God is being itself, pure and uncaused. All things maintain their very existence through God. We know that God has intellect because the world we reside in is intelligible. God has no need to experience change or time because he actualizes their very existence, and in order to do so, must already have perfect knowledge of it. Humans, even our souls, are created beings and are not any more a part of God than anything else that exists. Jesus was unique in that he was a hypostatic union of human nature and divine nature, and even though he was an indivisible union, these natures nevertheless remained distinct.
Edit: I wrote this response before you added that this was specific to the theology of John Scotus Eriugena.
Yes. He was posthumously condemned in 1225 with an order for his books to be burned. When his works resurfaced in the 1600s, he was added to the banned books index.
Edit: Ah, yeah, this was just one thinker. Early catholic thought is diverse and fascinating. A lot of work went into reconciling religion (and the rest of society really) with the “science” of the time. There is a lot of fun exploratory work trying to reconcile Catholicism with other philosophies, only some of which became cannon. It’s one of the reasons why the scientific revolution was so jarring for all of society - it threw thousands of years of convergent philosophy across society into a paradigm shift when we were forced to abandon things like the 4 element theory.
I think most mysticism from all various religions eventually arise at a similar conclusion, this leads me to believe it must be the truth.
Either it's truth or it's something about the human mind/experience that gets them to the same ideas.
Yep you can take this one pretty far
It's easy to imagine making all the exact same decisions as someone else, if you were born into their body and lived their experiences.
A decision is a reaction from an observer: and it requires information and feedback. Is the thing that decides special? Is it the same thing as everyone else's?
If you can imagine it, does it make it more likely? Only time tells.
https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
Wow, dammit! That syndrome of "something you always wondered or thought only you thought already having a name" strikes again!
My intuition for all sentience between "fragments" of a single consciousness from outside the universe was that, if Free Will™ is real, then true randomness can only come from outside a system..
I always loved this as it seems to be a more modern way of interpreting the monad. Could it not be the case that all particles are actually just one thing that is not subject to time and that our reality is a snapshot of a matrix of its different potentials?
CP-violation would appear to rule this out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation
The main referenced wiki suggests that the missing positrons are inside protons, but recent a recent LHC experiment asserts CP-violation over baryons.
Wouldn’t this be a CPT exchange, though?
Whole idea is from 40s and nonsensical with modern understanding of quantum fields.
it's important to realize that very few physicists accept that idea
right up there with everything that will happen in the universe has already happened and it's just a matter of zooming out on the entire time dimension (some use that idea to explain "spooky action at a distance" quantum entanglement and the quantum eraser)
but I love how wikipedia even links the PBS Space Time about it
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk
This theory adds more complications than it creates simplifications.
I’d note that occams razor is a probabilistic statement and not a law.
But who is applying it?
Complications vs simplifications was a restatement of Occam’s razor as you assuredly know and knew. However complications added can be doors to other hidden processes that are simply poorly understood or observe. The increase in complications isn’t necessarily a pure gradient, it can indicate where more interesting questions lie.
In this specific case experimental evidence shows it’s almost certainly not true. It was less the complications that killed it than objective observation.
Gotta admit, that is probably my favorite Wikipedia article. It reads like a conversation between two stoned teenagers (which, admittedly, a lot of cosmology and quantum physics do, to non-physicists like myself).
Even if there were as many positrons as electrons in the universe, I don't get the time-reversed character at a macro level. When leaving antimatter out of the picture, I dimly understand that the arrow of the arises from entropy. If time reversed particles are antiparticles, shouldn't we sometimes see a diffuse cloud of antiparticles in a lab spontaneously condense into a very low entropy concentrated configuration?
The answer is that they don’t literally go backwards in time showing reverse causality. They are representable in QFT by reversing the time component of their counterpart, which doesn’t impact how they interact with broader causality, just their internal configuration. Further - this does not play out in the lab as reversed causality even between anti particles. You can collide two positrons then detect them later at their destinations just fine in normal causality. It’s a shame because it would be really sweet to find some reversal of entropy and causality somewhere or somehow!
May I introduce you to Maxwell’s Demon?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon
You may, but if you read the link, you’ll find it consistent with the second law of thermodynamics despite being clever about it. The demonstration of consistency requires a modern understanding of information theory, but it’s been long realized it’s likely not a real “out.”
I'm too low energy to click on that link.
_We_ are still traveling forwards in time. If you followed a cloud of antiparticles backwards in time along its direction of travel, then you would see entropy decrease yes, though regular particles would do the same if we followed them back in time.
My thought is that if there's only one electron, then its probabilistic location at a place and a time, should be impacted by its own energy across all places and times. That quantum gravity comes from generalizing the Schrodinger's equation to include these energies in the phase of the wave function, causing the phase to skew and the probability to update towards the location of large mass/energies.
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Space and time are illusions. So probably true in some sense...There is probably no electron at all...I mean, one would be quite arbitrary, why not two?
Where is the machine you used to type out this comment, and when did you type it?
Human language is poorly-suited for describing a coherent universe because you can construct all sorts of incoherent propositions (e.g. "what existed before time"/"what exists outside of reality" etc etc); philosophies/faiths have struggled with this for millennia.
It is good enough to get laid, though.
Yea, we use language to think, and this limitation hinders with the forming of such thoughts....
Well, thankfully we have formal languages too that vaguely model the universe and provide a stronger model of coherent thought.
Put on a VR headset and tell me where the buttons you see are?
Space is felt and so is time. Both are sensations that consciousness feels.
Where is the headset?
There is no headset!
No hay banda! and yet we hear a band..
How does this work with QFT? If an electron is just an excitation in a field then it being “one electron” is meaningless.
Yeah an electron is not a 'thing'. It's like saying there's only one wave in the ocean.
This could practically be a zen koan
It doesn't. It is theory for times proceeding QFT or modern quantum mechanics and nonsensical in its context.
It is like saying that meter is same everywhere. Electron is a quantized energy level of electron field, a measurement.
Then wouldn't it be "one-photon"? I've heard (but don't fully understand) that massed particles are simply photons trapped in toroidal vortices, which gives them an outward charge field and lets them interact with the Higgs. Annihilation supposedly just being untangling the toroid.
Pretty sure that electrons are a fundamental particle coming from the electron field. They are pointlike objects with no other components.
If mass is proportionally equivalent to energy, then this can't be true. The photon is the fundamental energy unit. Right?
Photons are the force carrier for the EM field, they are not electrons themselves.
Edit: look up a chart for the standard model of particle physics.
This might be a result of me not understanding theoretical physics, but this seems "not even wrong." How could you even go about testing this?
Maybe you could disprove it by observing a electron/positron pair being created and then annihilating each other, forming a closed loop that couldn't be part of the single path traced by a single particle.
How would you observe that?
IANP, but Ive always thought you should be able to observe reverse causality in a positron if true. That’s the primary effect of going backwards in time - a reverse in entropy.
The other side of the theory is the positron hidden in the proton. I assume a particle collider should be able to falsify this.
But it turns out antimatter isn’t supposed to actually move backwards in time but follows the same causality as everything else. It’s just that they represent their matter pairs configuration mathematically by reversing the time orientation. This isn’t super obvious but it’s very much different than going backwards in time literally. Sad!
This is yet another case where a layman-written wiki article about physics is highly confusing to other laypeople, because it only tells you half the story. Particularly because it seems to be based on a chapter of Feynman's popular science book. But the book actually goes on and points out how Feynman immediately dismissed Wheeler's hypothesis, because the universe contains a lot more electrons than positrons. You'd have to explain that imbalance first if you want to entertain this line of thought.
As a layperson myself - how can we tell that a distant celestial object is not made from antimatter? Afaik, it doesn't behave differently from matter, other than it annihilates on contact.
Also even if we could, that would only describe the practically and theoretically observable universe, which doesn't rule out other places looking very different (on its own)
Because distant celestial objects accelerate a lot of matter away from them as parts of different processes. For example if there were a sizeable chunk of space were antimatter than at the edge of this space there would be a constant glow of annihilation. We don't see that anywhere (well except things like quasars doing this at small scales.
So, yea, it would have to be outside the observable universe in which that means we can do no empirical science on it therefore it not being real to us.
What if most galaxies are actually dark matter, and we are the exception?
Depends exactly how your phrasing this.
Dark matter represents far more of the universe than 'light' matter by volume if our physics is correct, so by that most galaxies are mostly dark matter by default. We have found a few very small ones that don't seem to be.
With this said dark matter still influences the curvature of space time so its not completely invisible. We could see a dark galaxy because it would alter the images of galaxies behind it with things like Einstein rings and crosses.
Yea, it's really more about the fact that all electrons are exactly the same regardless of the level of precision we look at them. It would be like if we found another earth and that earth was the exact same earth. Not earth like, not very close to earth. The exact same earth down to the smallest fundamental level.
We have something like a spinor network in 4D space, where some portions are opposite others in parameters.
Is this a diagram of particles interacting or a single thread weaving through time? Pick your metaphor.
Isn't this proven incorrect by CP-violating processes that also violate T-symmetry (preserving CPT)?
How meaningful is this actually? Is this a measurable distinction, or a conceptual one with the same semantics?
It may not be one electron but it is one field.
I guess it's the age old question of what's a true, distinct particle/thing and what's just the disturbance of a vaster medium (wave)?
Another interesting one is the black hole electron: the electron as a stable micro black hole, possibly super-extremal.
Probably not, but apparently some of the math does work.
There's been some attempts to model all particles as micro black holes or stable quantum scale gravitational objects of some kind.
Black hole, or singularity? Black hole describes the event horizon and singularity describes the point like object that would exist in a non-rotating black hole.
“One electron ought to be enough for everyone.”
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