This, unfortunately, puts me somewhat in MU's camp: we don't truly understand either time or space. — jgill

So do you think that a point in spacetime designated A and another point in spacetime designated B is not scientifically rigorous? and we should accept that in mathematical terms, the distance between A and B cannot be traversed unless 'infinite acceleration' is a real thing? If you do then sure, sometimes your thinking is imo, unfortunate. But I don't think anyone could accuse you of being anti-science, whereas I think that is a fair criticism of MU and his woo woo.

Be careful with such so called evidence Athena.
"Most scholars view the patriarchal age, along with the Exodus and the period of the biblical judges, as a late literary construct that does not relate to any particular historical era, and after a century of exhaustive archaeological investigation, no evidence has been found for a historical Abraham."

From a quick search:
Cynthia Astle is a veteran journalist who has covered the worldwide United Methodist Church at all levels for more than 30 years, Cynthia B. Astle serves as editor of United Methodist Insight, an online journal she founded in 2011. So she is hardly an independent judge of any historical evidence for Abraham as a real boy.

Archaeology has been one of biblical history's greatest tools to sift out verified facts of Bible stories. In fact, over the past few decades archaeologists have learned a great deal about the world of Abraham in the Bible. Abraham is considered to be the spiritual father of the world's three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — Cynthia Astle

The words in bold talk about the world of Abraham. and the words underlined cites the bible as the source. This is no evidence at all that Abraham was a real boy, any more than the world of Gilgamesh or the world of harry potter, suggests they were real either.

If you enter something like 'was the biblical Abraham a real person?' I will find more convincing evidence against that claim than I will in support of it. But, I am an atheist who does not think that any of the biblical characters were real. So, I am a bit bias towards the evidence against Abraham existing as a real boy. Even though I am open to overwhelming evidence that he did exist and the events claimed did happen. I think such biblical characters are all parodies and satirical caricatures of many real people, who lived during those times and way back in the BCE past. Such are all based on Chinese whisper style stories, passed down with alterations from each telling, based on the biases/intentions/intrigues of each storyteller.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence or else we should treat any claim that these were real people and real events, as highly compromised. We need evidence similar to the level of evidence we have that Julius Caesar was a real boy and we need extraordinary evidence to accept than a fabled character like Abraham, interacted with angels etc.

MU is not worth your learned time or effort. He is a fully cooked noodnik, who does not accept any scientific findings about the origin, structure and workings of the universe, based purely on the fact that science cannot prove every woo woo conjecture about the origin, structure and workings of the universe wrong. He just points at ever reducing gaps and exclaims 'look! everyone! look, look look! gap there, gap there, gap there! I must keep screaming, gap there! Why won't the world recognise my genius for telling everyone about this!! GAP THERE!'

I suggest you would be happiest moving in this direction in your future studies. You might find it more akin to your reality.

Good idea! Time for you to read a bit ,instead of spouting your mouth off in ignorance. Regardless of whether you hold the degree you claim, it's never a good idea to make assertive claims of certainty about that which you know not. Like I've pointed out, this attitude of conceit has already led you to "change your tune" significantly, concerning the problem which mathematicians have and have not resolved. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are a flim flam artist, all smoke and mirrors and no substance. @Jaded Scholar has tried and tried again to clarify his points to you and imo, all you do is release more smoke to hide in. Again, all you do is point out what science does not know for sure yet, and you imagine that in some way, that means you know what you are talking about. Science follows where the evidence takes it, you follow your imaginings and think that will lead you to the truth of all things, instead of merely leading you right back to your own imaginings. You type like a deluded diva. You need a long holiday from your own conceit.

This is what creates the need for an infinite rate of acceleration at the moment when an object changes from being at rest to being in motion, which I referred to. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yet another example of the absolute BS you offer. There is no infinite rate of acceleration. When I move from A to B I do not need to infinity accelerate to get there, or else I would never get from my seat to the toilet! As I am incapable of infinite acceleration, so stop positing absolute piffle!!!!!

I would not be so adamant with such a misleading statement universeness. Of course, it appears to be an obvious truth, "we all know that you can get from point A to point B. However, we cannot truthfully model this procedure, getting from being at one point to being at another point, mathematically. That's exactly what makes Zeno's paradoxes so compelling, the mathematics cannot represent what appears to be so obvious to us. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's only misleading in YOUR imagination sir! I don't need to model that which I can DEMONSTRATE!!!!
Zeno's paradoxes may be impressive to your esoteric thinking but I don't find any paradox compelling, just like I don't find any placeholders compelling like, god, infinite, nothing, omnipotent, omniscient or any other omni, supernatural, etc, etc. I can decide to amuse myself by thinking that I am thinking that I am thinking that I am thinking that I might not be really thinking or I can settle for I think therefore I am and move on. You can exist amongst the parade of available paradoxes if you wish to but please try to stop attempting to infect others which such staid thinking.

Then we must concede that it's not really true that "you can get from point A to point B" because one is never truly at point A or point B. — Metaphysician Undercover

I create purpose and I create meaning so I can assign point A and point B.
So, Yeah, nae bother pal!, and on the way to your funny farm, you can always try to find out what it's like to BE the spoon rather than just accept that there is no spoon or else perhaps you could just use the spoon to eat yer cornflakes and stop typing esoteric, woo woo pish!

How about the 'Topic,' you must remember that one?

I feel like he kind of owes me one anyway since I was obligated to buy his astrophysics textbook twice because Pluto's demotion happened during my undergraduate degree. — Jaded Scholar

:smile: I bought Sean's book Space, Time and Motion. I am working between that and my second reading of Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, which I first read around 15 years ago. I have also started a wee book called 'The little book of Philosophy,' by Rachel Poulton. :grin: So far, so good!
I intend to buy Sean's next two books in this series of 3.
My 86 year old mother, who stays with me, is not doing well at the moment however, so I have to dedicate a lot more of my time to her needs. Such is the way of things.

and is probably a bit more to the left of both of yours in terms of the other policies I support. — Jaded Scholar

I doubt it, but would probably have even more political common ground with you than with jgill, (I also only base that on his 'moderate conservative' dalliance.) if you are very left wing. I am a democratic socialist and I fully support such tenets as:
'To secure for the workers, by hand or by brain, the full fruits of their industry and full control over the means of production, distribution and exchange.'
'From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.' etc, etc.
I am totally against all 'free market economy' on a national, international or global scale (but I am ok with it at a controlled local scale). So I am fully against any form of unfettered capitalism.
No billionaire's or multi-millionaires allowed in the system I would favour but I am okay with small localised capitalism and I support personal freedom and entrepreneurialism as much as such can be supported within an socioeconomic system that is as fair as it can possibly be to all stakeholders involved.

I support UBI for now and an eventual conversion to a money free resource based global economy within a united planet.
I would like to see the end of the notion of 'countries.'
I would like to see the end of all party politics. You vote for a person, not a party!
I was very politically active in my youth, and was a member of left wing political groups, Young Socialists, The UK Labour party, The Co-operative Labour party, etc.
The Tony Blair years made me leave the labour party and I have been against party politics ever since.
I am currently a member of progressive political groups such as 'Compass,' from where I live in Scotland, in this Ununited Kingdom.
Sorry JS, my rant does sound a little like a political manifesto, but at least it helps make our political positions clear and we can get back to our science chat.

(IMO Zeno should be dead and buried) — jgill

I second that emotion! Especially when we all know that you can get from point A to point B, despite Zeno's rather boring thought experiment. All Zeno did, was the very trivial finding that the concept of infinity is problematic. No shit Sherlock!

Do you remember the Cabana bar?


They had a dark choc version that I remember well and was sorry to see discontinued. Couldn't have been popular enough amongst the 'chompers.'

Hah! Ya surrender monkey! Ah might gie yi a wee bit aff the end! (flipping auto correct keeps messing wi ma slang man!)

Well, mad cow disease would be yer reward, if you manage that one. I would do ma ninja moves and avoid your attack and get to the twix. F***** if I am eating you, ah don't want mad cow disease! Or even worse, I might start Russian about.

Not If I got to it first pal!

Yeah, not mad on da Twixes myself, but I will indulge if that's all that's on offer!

The payday bar reminds me more of the now defunct Rowntree's Nutty Bar from the 1970's, minus the covering chocolate.

Don't forget the cheeky wee toffee crisp!

How about a wee star bar or the old favourite Twix?

It's a bit like a 'picnic' in Scotland, but not quite.
Cant say if they would taste exactly the same as I've never tasted a payday bar.
The inside config of a picnic looks different to a payday bar but perhaps the same basic ingredients:

Similarly with a lion bar, which has not got the big nuts of the pictured payday bar!

Do you two need yer big nuts, with yer big chocolate bar?

Awe! That's so nice :flower: I forgot I had a big tub of 'Celebrations,' all the mini choc bars you could ever want! Including mini mars bars! Oh, I also bought a Caol ila 12, An Ardbeg Uigeadail and a Lagavulin 16.

I can't take your whisky chat seriously, knowing that you have so little chocolate bar discernment. Mars bars indeed. — Jamal

That's alright, while you come to terms with that, this weekend, I will nibble happily on a mars bar, et al, in between sips of the wonderful two bottles of Ileach I Just bought.

Yeah, we come in a few varieties. I am an omnivore and there are few foods I don't like, so I'm not a fussy eater.
I also like all condiments. I tend to dislike unfamiliar foods however. I don't like eating stuff like caviar, fois gras, kangaroo, octopus, squid, bugs etc. But I never met a chocolate concoction I did not like.

The Double Decker was one of my fav's but I also loved crunchies, bounty bars, mars bars, marathon bars, milky ways, yorkies and most other chocolate bars that have ever existed.

He sounds like a brother of the bounce! We wonderfully nuanced and sometimes contradictory personalities, are always interesting to live with.

Oh, I agree and so does my immediate family and the nurse who shakes her head, almost every time I go for my annual HbA1C test. She reminds me of the blindness, loss of legs, kidney failure etc that come with excessive intake of sugar for type 2 diabetics. Your husband is doing it correctly, if he is taking the meds, getting a little exercise, keeping his weight down and only ever having a little bit of what he fancies now and again. I am more a feast and famine type of personality. I can keep up a routine for a while but then I need to break out and rebel. It's something that run's very deep. So, If I get anywhere near 78, I will be very surprised to have 'gotten away with it.' In fact I will probably die of surprise!

Those who don't learn from our errors in history are doomed to repeat them.

I have always felt there should be free education all the way to professional degrees and PhDs, and there should be free health care for all. I firmly support Medicare and Social Security, along with defined benefit retirement plans. — jgill

That's some good and wide common ground we are on sir! I would be proud to stand firm beside you in any fight on any of those issues.

My opinion of you is very, very high, Buddy ! — jgill

Well, I can only hope I never let you down. Thanks for the boost, we all need a little of that sometimes.
I have valued every exchange we have had so far and I really enjoy reading your posts.

I am not suggesting or recommending that you engage in tit for tat ad hominems, as fun as I personally find that at times on TPF, depending who I am dealing with. I was merely pointing out that in general, I do not find you a good interlocutor or an impressive thinker. I fully accept that you feel the same way about me and perhaps some other members of TPF, would agree with me or with you. So there it is, and on the universe goes, regardless of our little disputes. As far as I am concerned, I will continue to read what you type, when perusing threads and I will consider what you type, and respond if I feel it's important to do so, based on my own worldviews. For me, that's just 'my usual approach,' for discussion forums. So, you are not a good interlocutor imo, and I think your approach and the worldviews you offer, in what I have read from you so far, exacerbate the problematic rather than aid the solutions I think our species need. I expect your response to be 'I don't give a f*** what your opinion is of me,' and I feel the same way, so, we all move on. Who knows MU, there have been many occasions when a person on a forum quickly becomes a perceived enemy, then due to some identification of some unexpected common ground, they become more like a frenemy and then on occasion, almost a friend, and then on another occasion, right back to a full enemy and then sometimes such folks even get married and have children or the very same people might choose to kill each other in a field of battle, a terrorist act, or in a marital home. Individual human psyche is rarely boring when you drill down deep enough.

You claimed that a statement I made was a jump. Your claim is about the reasoning of my statemen, and you have that reasoning in front of you, so the burden of proof is in fact on you to justify your claim about what you are reading. The only thing that carries no burden of proof is "I don't know", which is not what you said. You misunderstand the burden of proof, as if it means "I get to claim that someone else's reasoning is fallacious without responsibility" which is not what it means. — Hallucinogen

Oh, that's easy. My main evidence against your god of the gaps proposal ranges from the problem of evil to the problem of divine hiddenness. So your jump that forms the title of this thread and the pure speculation that is the basis of your numbered subjective opinions is no evidence in support of your god of the gaps proposition. The god posit is also unfalsifiable so cannot be proved wrong, but all a god has to do is stop hiding, if it exists, otherwise it will remain fictitious or irrelevant.

2. The success of digital physics and the holographic principle imply that physical space is an emergent 3D representation of information processing. — Hallucinogen

What success are you referring to? This is merely your opinion. In a Computer for example a 1 can be used to represent any value in an analogue range of measurements of voltage > 0 and <= 5 volts.
There is no proof that any aspect of the information of the universe is digital or binary. It can be represented as such but such emulations are not indicative of a first cause mind. Such indicates that you require intent to create a simulation/emulation, but as far as we know, simulation/emulation was invented by humans not gods, and the holographic principle is not proven, so it's currently conjecture.

3. Quantum cognition and decision theory have shown that information processing in a mind exhibits quantum principles known to underlie the emergence of physical space. — Hallucinogen

The idea that QM is part of human consciousness is not proven and even if it was that does not mean god exists (another one of your jumps). No such link between information processing in the mind and the emergence of physical space has been proven (you are jumping around more than a typical Earth bound bunny rabbit!)

4. From (2) and (3), the information processing from which physical space is emergent is scientifically indistinguishable from the information processing that occurs in a mind. — Hallucinogen

But 2 and 3 are nothing but pure conjectures based on your personal misguided interpretation of scientific proposals, so 'From (2) and (3),' is logically fallacious as you have not established that 2 or 3 is true!

5. Restating (1) in terms of (4), our world is either scientifically indistinguishable from the result of information processing in a mind, or it is the result of information processing in a mind.
6. Therefore, our world is the result of information processing in a mind, this mind we call God. — Hallucinogen

Well, I think you should go for 'I' in those words I have bolded in the above quote, rather than assuming you speak for any significant group of 'we' considering there are more varieties of gods proposed than varieties of chocolate.
such 'silly' conclusion as 5 and 6 above only invokes :roll: or/and :lol: for the rational thinker.

Point out the exact statement I made that is "god of the gaps". — Hallucinogen

Your thread title!!!! and most of the statement made in your opening!
Any concept of 'digital physics,' is purely speculative!!!

"Digital physics is a speculative idea that the universe can be conceived of as a vast, digital computation device, or as the output of a deterministic or probabilistic computer program."
You are trying to peddle woo woo god of the gap posits and trying to fool people that you have a sound academic based, scientific case, it's utter nonsense, nothing more.

This is a description of the quality of your own reasoning. You simply declare assertions about reasoning that you dislike to be incorrect with no substantive basis. Whenever you are challenged, you simply switch to a new form of denial without supporting what you previously denied. — Hallucinogen

Well, peddlers of woo woo always claim such things, when their woo woo is clearly displayed, yes?
I suggest you swallow that bitter pill whole, and try to escape from the theistic shackles, that fog and encumber your rational faculties.

My wife and I usually vote moderate conservative these days, — jgill

:scream: :lol:
I am a leftie democratic socialist Mr Gill, I hope that does not lower your opinion of me too much.

*I want to take a minute to devolve into wild speculation. If I'm right (which I may not be - I need to research that) about it being possible for different compactifications to exist in different parts of the same universe, then that would lead to a lot of potential universes where the physical laws are different in different regions. A perfectly stable hydrogen atom in one region may decay into a puff of light or a micro black hole if it wanders into a region with vastly different, say, scale factors of the four fundamental forces. So a consistent compactification of our spacetime might exist by virtue of the anthropic principle - we could only possibly exist in one of the more stable possibilities. But ... what if our universe is dotted with regions where "normal" matter is mostly unaffected, but things like sfermions rapidly decay or something? That might be a potential answer to the how those particles can be functionally absent from our universe without necessarily breaking supersymmetry? I'm sure that doesn't make it any easier to test or anything, but it could be interesting if it were possible. — Jaded Scholar

An interesting idea but would such not mean that the cosmological principle was not true a.k.a a homogenous and isotropic universe would be untrue? That would have very big consequentials, would it not? Such as every constant might be not be a constant within certain regions of space, such as light speed or even the expansion rate and the temperature of the cosmic background radiation?
Is the idea of different laws of physics applying to different regions not part of the basis of the many world theory and the 'bubble' universe as a label for 'conceptually' different universes in a multi-verse or different 'regions' in an alternate use of a label such as 'Cosmos?'

BTW, I plan to spend some of my free time researching under the keywords of 'string/superstring states.' I hope that will gain me some more insight and prompt questions. I often try to email questions to folks who offer their help on sites such as 'ask an astrophysicist' or 'ask a mathematician,' etc. I have had some very useful responses in the past. I have not came across an 'ask a string theorist,' site yet. I have also tried to directly email folks like Ed Witten, Brian Greene and other known popular scientists such as Sean Carroll, Lee Smolin etc. Sean has his monthly 'ask me anything podcasts,' such as the most recent one below, but I have not tried to use that avenue yet. These are over 3 hours long, so good to fall asleep to at night, when the TV is so crap! :blush:

Your separation of maths from the mathematicians who practise the art, is a premise I cannot accept. Furthermore, ad hominem doesn't interest me, and that seems to be all you have to offer me. — Metaphysician Undercover

You complain about getting compared to a muppet and then you insult all mathematicians by calling their science an art. Stealth insults are still insults. You continue to focus on complaining about what science still does not know for sure, and you then assume that this gives you legitimacy, when you offer your own very weak claims and pure speculations about what you claim must be true. You will only ever gain followers who are easily fooled but that will only ever be some of the people, some or all of the time. You have no solutions, and you offer no methodology that is even part of the solutions our species need. You remain part of the problem as you are ossified in your anti-science stance. That is a very unfortunate legacy to burden the more easily mislead members of the next generation with, imo.

Prove that it's a jump. — Hallucinogen

The burden of proof regarding posits you put forward, as supposed evidence for the existence of a god lies with you the proposer, not me the sceptic, the atheist.

Asserting baseless skepticism about scientific findings isn't a response I see often. — Hallucinogen

Wheras, inflating and projecting scientific findings into god of the gaps woo woo posits, is something we are all offered regularly.

What do you think qualifies as the most compelling point you make in your OP as evidence that a god exists?
— universeness

Conclusions tend to rely on the whole of the argument, not just one isolated part of it. — Hallucinogen

The conclusions can be anything you like when the whole of the argument amounts to pure flights of fancy.

I also can eat these by the big family bag, with single malt whisky chasers.

Again, as a type 2 diabetic ( which I probably received due to a long relationship with such products, that took me to 17 stone at 5 foot 11inches tall, ( I am now about 14.5 stone)) My rebellious nature, means that death by chocolate remains a serious possibility, despite the meds I take for it. I think the ave lifespan for a type 2 diabetic, that does not get it under sufficient control is around 67. So I have around 8 years of enjoying my dark chocolate, (with any centre but honeycomb is a fav,) rebel status. :grin:

the honeycomb is thicker, heavier and richer than the Cadbury version. — Tom Storm

:yum: :yum: I want a kilo or two of those!!!! Do they come in a dark chocolate version :pray:

Do they make a candy that literally contains honeycomb? — TiredThinker

I think it's called a 'Crunchie!' I love em! But my type 2 diabetes complains!

The place to start is in the definition of a ground state. The ground state of any quantum system is the lowest-energy state, which is necessarily a zero-mode wavefunction, but not necessarily a zero-energy state. In string theory, the string's vibrational modes are different to the modes of QM wavefunctions, but obey similar rules, I think - most relevant is that they are complex functions that can evaluate to complex numbers for the physical attributes they represent.
This means that the lowest-energy state has no vibrations (and yes, zero temperature) but can potentially have an energy level that is positive or even negative. The latter is what emerges in bosonic string theory, and in that context, negative-energy vibrational modes give rise to negative-squared (imaginary number) values for mass. I.e. tachyons. — Jaded Scholar

I bolded the words that impact my current understanding the most.
As you suggest, a lowest-energy state is not a zero energy state, so my question then becomes (or perhaps what I need to research more is) is there an example in physics of an energy state that involves an object being completely at rest relative to every other object in the universe, including an 'expanding' spacetime? I know such as this:
"Some might think that at absolute zero particles lose all energy and stop moving. This is not correct. In quantum physics there is something called zero point energy, which means that even after all the energy from particles has been removed, the particles still have some energy."
but I don't currently really understand it, other than assuming that the remaining energy being referred to is a potential energy, that exists because something is present rather than 'nothing' (whatever that label refers to within any notion of 'real.') I need to learn a lot more about a posited string state that is not vibrating and is not moving in any way.

In every source I checked, the theory on this is kind of buried beneath a whole lot of maths that kind of obscures some of the basics. Two things I learned that helped me piece more together are:

1) String theory seems to have an inextricable relationship between the spin and mass of a particle, mostly in just needing the space of spin states to not be purely bosonic (integers) in order to have a stable ground state of mass/energy (which, more specifically, doesn’t result in a mass that is an imaginary number).
2) Tachyons are what you get when a quantum object has an imaginary mass. They are not a problem per se, since they don’t necessarily break causality despite being nonrelativistic, but they are a big problem if everything can decay into a tachyonic state – because an object with imaginary mass actually increases in speed as its energy decreases, and to slow it down to the speed of light (the bare maximum for creating most particles) would require an infinite amount of energy.

So yeah, clearly an absolutely rubbish ground state to emerge from your theory. — Jaded Scholar

Yeah, it's never a good sign when any kind of infinity shows up in a theory.

If your system can be specified with a meaningful number of strings in high-energy states, you can still get some reasonable results from it, but if every ground state can only be excited by giving it an infinite amount of energy, you're never going to be able to accurately model our actual universe, in which we see no obvious sinks of infinite free energy and no observations of tachyons at any of the countless particule creation and annihilation events we've ever observed.

I'm sure you still have questions about how the zero-mode state can somehow still have nonzero (if non-positive) vibrational states, and I preemptively admit that I am not sure. I think the answer lies in the need for the (complex-number) wavefunctions to sometimes resolve into non-Real expectation values for mass when their phase space is restricted to only integer spin values, which we know is not realistic. Kind of like how tunneling particles don't have any physical velocity while they are tunneling, but if you force their speed to resolve into a number, it comes out as an imaginary number too.

But that's just a guess, which I have not remotely fleshed out mathematically. I hope it makes you feel better to know that the maths involved in this is absolutely beyond my current capacity too. — Jaded Scholar

It's comforting that you can so easily and correctly predict where your comments will send my thinking, as it reassures me that there is no surprise amongst the experts when lay folks like myself stumble so easily on this stuff. I also hope that you realise that the time and effort you have spent in trying to explain some of the fundamental ideas involved here are very much appreciated by many lay folks who are very interested in truth seeking.

Based on the things that allowed me to connect the most dots while writing this, I think that if I were to suggest a direction for you to research to better understand quantum theory and string theory is this: the simple harmonic oscillator. It is one of the most foundational concepts in Physics as a whole, but especially so in QM, and I think even moreso in String Theory. Like these theories themselves, the maths for it starts out very simple, but can get incredibly complex (even before you add 9 other dimensions to it). — Jaded Scholar

Oh absafragginlootly! I have encountered the 'harmonic oscillator,' so many times in my general research into this stuff. I have watched this a few times. It's a very good beginning imo.

P.S. I forgot to work it into my response, but I enjoyed the tunnelling and annihilation puns. :D — Jaded Scholar

it's important to always leave room for a wee giggle or two! otherwise we might become too prone to despair when dealing with the sophistry that can seem so ossified and so deep rooted in the place of mind where folks like MU decide to anchor and vibrate from.

I think I don't want to create a new profile here, but the next time I create a new username, I think will choose something different. I do like the virtues of being an eager, inquiring, or musing scholar, but on reflection, I might go with something like ForeverScholar. It's always been important to me to constantly update my understanding wherever possible (I like to say that at every point in my life, I could look back on myself ten years ago and cringe at how mistaken he was in some way, and if I ever stop doing that, it'll mean I've stopped growing). There is literally always more to learn (in both the expansion of knowledge and the correction of errors), and literally always more and deeper layers of internalised biases that we can uncover within our own thinking, and in doing so, see everything a little more clearly. Both of those are deeply important to me, and I've been reminded of that by the stark contrast in this thread between your thirst to expand your knowledge and MU's determination to avoid doing so. — Jaded Scholar

Seem's to me that you also have a good plan of action!
Thanks again for all the help you have offered so far! :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :flower:

Here's my variant of the Digital Physics Argument for the existence of God: — Hallucinogen

And you accuse me of making irrational jumps! :roll:

So according to any simulated universe theory, we are simulations that create simulations.
— universeness
This is an irrational jump. — Hallucinogen

So a mind is implicated from facts about what physical space is. — Hallucinogen

No human being knows what physical space IS, and the facts about physical space that we do know do not implicate a mind at source. To suggest it does, is indeed an irrational jump.
What do you think qualifies as the most compelling point you make in your OP as evidence that a god exists?

Continuing my 'plan of action:'

So you need to avoid letting any of those extra dimensions get too big (actually, another thing I just learned is that you don’t have to – but if you don’t, then you need to tweak basically everything else in the maths to make it work again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_extra_dimensions). — Jaded Scholar

Interesting, and this reminds me of an aspect of Computing Science in the ADITDEM cyclical model for software development. The further back in the analysis, design, implementation, testing, documentation, evaluation, maintenance you find weakness or error, the more 'cascade effect' you will have to deal with. If the weakness or error is found to be at the analysis stage then the entire code may be seriously impacted.

it’s possible that the edges of our universe join up, and that a random straight line will eventually lead back to where you started, but that doesn’t change anything on a local scale. However, what if some of our spatial dimensions span different scales, and if you changed the orientation of that trajectory by 90 degrees, you might only need to travel half the distance to cross the universe that way? It still makes no difference locally, but I like it as a stepping stone to imagining that there’s some other spatial dimension where, if you rotate another 90 degrees, to move into its plane, it only takes you two steps before you end up back where you started? What if it was so short a loop that it could be lapped even by the vibration of our molecules at room temperature? Or even smaller? No matter how far you travel in that dimension (i.e. how many times you lap around it), you’ll feel the exact same forces from the sun’s gravity, from a nearby magnet, or from any passing photon. It can be small enough so that it is negligible to everything in the universe except the mathematical degrees of freedom of a string’s vibrations. — Jaded Scholar

Well, in sci-fi they certainly use such notions as subspace and hyperspace. I have often wondered how these are proposed, when it comes to extension? Sci-fi shows seem to suggest travel through subspace or hyperspace without any alteration to an objects 3D extensions. If when we move, we are actually traversing 10D space, then we can't get from A to B any faster than our current tech permits. So I can't currently imagine a tiny dimension that a 3D extended (macro) object can enter and traverse, and by doing so, travel (tachyon style) faster than light. Something smaller than the planck size can only exist within a black hole, is that not true? So this is another area I need to learn a lot more about.
I have great difficulty trying to imagine a tiny extra wrapped (compactified) dimension as a 'continuum of space.' I can understand using a coordinate to represent a point in that space but that's about it.

The Calabi-Yau manifolds and their ilk admittedly involve some incredibly complex maths to add many of these compactified dimensions without changing strings’ behaviour in ways that we don’t want; because when you compactify several dimensions, that can cause strings to affect each other in different kinds of ways, depending on the particular compactifications. Calabi-Yau manifolds are a solution that cleverly balances those complications to return conditions on the behaviour of strings within them to be similar to that of regular 4-space. — Jaded Scholar

Yeah but is the main problem not that there are ${10^{200,000}}$ possible configurations and we don't know which one is our universe?

Yes and no. I mean, yes, you are, but there is some degree to which it is accurate to conflate them. If I understand it, both of these kinds of motion use the same dimensions, but the motion of the string is the change in where, in spacetime, the string is located, and the vibrational velocity is how fast the oscillations of the string itself are moving. For a silly (and hopefully clearer) example, if you stand up with your feet planted on the ground and wiggle your hips from side to side, your motion in spacetime (as defined by the position of your feet, at least) is zero, but you have a nonzero vibrational velocity. If you stop wiggling but take a jump to the left, then you have moved within spacetime, but have zero vibrational velocity. — Jaded Scholar

That's a very interesting comparison. Are you posing a 1D open string state that may be 'anchored' at one or both ends, but vibrating along its extension, and a 1D open string state that is a 'free' moving object but is not vibrating?

I have had a different imagery of strings. I imagine a spacetime of continuous tiny guitar strings, that have no 'rest state' other than a potential one (the heat death of the universe via entropy).
If you observe a human 'Mexican wave' the waveform is created via each human involved, just standing up and sitting back down again. It's the undulations of the 'point particle' or 'individual humans acting like an aspect of a string,' that causes the waveform. In a similar way, strings vibrate and cause waveforms or field excitations etc. I imagine that an object can move in this underlying structure by being passed from human to human along the wave form. Now I struggle a lot more when I have to appreciate that the moving object being passed along the string vibrations is itself made of string vibrations, so I know my imagery is wrong, so I need to learn a lot more about possible 'string states.' But are you suggesting that a non-vibrating string state is a valid possibility within string theory?
Would that not mean that there is something in the universe that does not move, relative to anything?

Apologies for going AWOL for so long! Half of the reason is that I got Covid last week, and the other half is that I wanted to do sufficient research to reply to universeness before I posted anything. — Jaded Scholar

Yay you're back! Sorry to hear you got that flipping Covid! I have had it twice myself. Fortunately, only after I had been jabbed, so I survived both and no long-covid. Thank you sooooooooo much for the time and effort you took to answer my questions as well as you did.
I need to take the time required to unpack your response and do my own further research before I respond with the depth necessary to be able to progress from the rally points you have set.
There are a lot of LED style (soft lighting) points that I can see, have illuminated some distant pathways in my head, based on the main points you laid out in your response. I will move towards them slowly and carefully and investigate. It will take a while but you have given me enough 'trigger points' for me to be hopefully directed correctly. My responses will trickle towards this thread, slowly but surely. I hope you will indulge them and enjoy them.

Here is my plan of action:

The short version is that both of these things are really just necessary for string theory to work (or rather, to not violate known, observable physical laws), and I don’t think there’s very much that’s particularly profound about them (unless we can prove they are true, of course). — Jaded Scholar

This affords me some conformation of how 'consequentialism,' plays such a large role in the scientific method. 'String theory/Superstring theory/Mtheory have an aesthetic beauty imo, that make many of us sooooo hope that them or such as them, are 'true.' So the 'what do we need to be true, for this idea to work,' becomes a motivation. This is not a criticism of science or scientists, but more a celebration of the robustness and honesty of the method applied. For string theory to be correct, this, and this, and this, etc are the consequentials that MUST follow, based on our current understanding of the workings and structure of the Universe. You have helped to make that fundamental 'scene' and 'big picture,' crystal clear, in my psyche. A good starting point imo.

Supersymmetry is just the proposition that the quantum spin property of any quantum object/string shouldn’t be restricted (to be necessarily integer or half-integer) by any of the other properties of that object/string. Or: There’s no reason that, for every boson, a fermion with every other property otherwise identical to the boson can’t theoretically exist (and vice versa). — Jaded Scholar

So I need to look a little more into the concept of the colloquially named 'spin,' or 'angular momentum,' and understand how that seems to govern the findings that
1. Fermions have antiparticles and bosons don't.
2. The Pauli exclusion principle only applies to fermions.
3. Supersymmetry is a fermion–boson symmetry, postulating that multiplets of fundamental particles contain both fermions and bosons. Thus, for example, since electrons exist there should also be “selectrons”
Understanding how 1,2 and 3 apply to string theory are key, I think. Would you agree?

I just learned that Spin is one of those rare things which is actually simpler to describe in string theory than standard quantum mechanics: it’s defined by the frequency of a string’s rotation around its one-dimensional axis. More on this when we get to tachyons again. — Jaded Scholar

I need to learn more about where my imagery is incorrect when I try to relate strings moving within spacetime and strings creating spacetime. A string as a 1D extension and as a closed loop. In my research so far I have came up against such as Weyl Symmetry and Conformal field theory, so I get quickly swamped, but its great fun, trying to process my understanding and your insights help me direct my efforts in the right directions.

The compactified dimensions involve some much more complex maths (as those manifold images persuasively indicate!), but has always been a very simple idea, at its core. String theory needs more than 4 spacetime dimensions to work, but needs to reduce to 4-space at large scales because relativity would make gravity behave very differently to observed results otherwise. — Jaded Scholar

Yes, the best image I have of that so far is 'wriggle room,' which I have tried to cognise as 'vibrating in three directions is not enough to make the workings and structure of this universe and cause every object that exists in it,' so a string has to vibrate in more than 3 physical dimensions. But I would probably need a maths skill level like that of @jgill to be able to start to understand, exactly why!

I don't like very long posts that folks have to scroll through too much so I will end this post here and break things up into smaller more manageable 'chunks.'

If those who wished to argue science were Gentlemen, like you my friend, or Ladies, some of those who left might have stayed. But this is all conjecture. And philosophy is all about argument. — jgill

Thanks for your kind words and your willingness to share some of your mathematical insights with those who are not expert in the field, despite the exasperating responses you will inevitably receive from those who have their own (sometimes rather sinister) sometimes eccentric, agenda or those who are just pathological trolls and just get a buzz from trying to 'dis' an expert on their own field of expertise.

I think your points are well made and ring true, to me at least. I personally think that all philosophical musings and statements require scientific contribution, otherwise they face the 'pure woo woo,' or 'total speculation' accusation. If they don't welcome scientific input then, imo, this will always push philosophy and philosophers into a second class league of thinking and thinkers (this is of-course, perhaps from only my own notion of such 'leagues.') at least this puts philosophical musing ahead of a third class notional league of thinkers, which would include theists and theosophists, imo.
This leaves me open to accusations of 'scientism' or 'favouritism,' as I imply that those who prioritise scientific thinking and use of the scientific method, are 'first class thinkers.' I can only accept such criticism with agreement, and a large grin of personal contentment.

I am a member of some more science based sites and I enjoy the different emphasis from the membership of those sites compared to TPF, but those sites tend to not include the social. political (including realpolitik), humanist, religious and psychological aspects of the topic under discussion, that you get here on TPF. So experiencing as wide a range of responders to your own worldview, is I think very demanding but also potentially very valuable in trying to become a wiser person yourself.

I am personally grateful for the presence and contribution of subject specific expertise, such as yourself, (including of-course those who have academic expertise in the philosophy field) on TPF, as it tends to be a presence and contribution that effectively counters the more eccentric and woo woo peddlers, that are also here on TPF and would otherwise, turn this site into something akin to fox/fake news.

I don't see an evident basis on which to generalize the property of being simulated to the mind that is simulating the physical space (especially since it is minds in which information processing occurs). — Hallucinogen

Why? we humans can produce simulations/emulations to the extent that we even call them 'virtual' reality! So according to any simulated universe theory, we are simulations that create simulations. There is no compelling reason for that regression to stop. That's why the theists provide even poorer responses to 'who made god,' than scientists who speculate on 'before the big bang.'

All we're establishing here is a mind, hence the conclusion in (6). — Hallucinogen

The problem is that we have not established 'a mind,' as against say 'a mindless spark that sparked and then no longer exists or such cyclical posits as Roger Penrose's CCC. The only valid answer is:

The grounds for that possibility aren't given. — Hallucinogen

In other words, no human has any compelling evidence whatsoever about the existence of god and there is no 'digital physics argument' that is worth the paper or web post it is posited on. Such are pure speculations at best.

The scientific evidence is that physical space is simulated. — Hallucinogen

No it's not! There is no compelling evidence that such a conjecture has any truth value at all.

You are simply using gaps in current scientific knowledge, to impose god posits or 'a first cause mind with intent' as a placeholder, which is far far far more unlikely to be true, than say Roger Penrose's CCC, which at least has 'hawking points,' as it's main evidence. He at least can empirically challenge the alternate 'possible,' explanations for the existence of Hawking points, as put forward by folks like Alan Guth etc. That particular debate/discussion is still alive and kicking within the science community as far as i know.