Jarhyn
Wizard
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2010
- Messages
- 14,857
- Gender
- Androgyne; they/them
- Basic Beliefs
- Natural Philosophy, Game Theoretic Ethicist
Well, I think that's more a function of asking bad questions. "Why is there something" is not a useful question. There is no fundamental "why" to something like "math", it just is, such that it is.Indeed. From a higer dimensional perspective, spacetime is just a four-dimensional block of stuff that never changes. The future isn't known to an observer embedded in the block, but then, such observers don't even agree on which parts of the block are "future" and which are "past".Important thing here, and I think it bears observation: having some dimension along which there is a single direction of change that is not perpendicular to the single dimension of mono-directional change we experience is entirely possible.I don't get this 'outside of time' idea. Time is relative and so flows at different rates, but being outside of time as in 'no time' implies that nothing happens, no events, no thoughts, no actions because all of these take time and are time.
The problem is that some people have a very weak understanding of what "time" is, or what makes some dimension "temporal".
For an example, yet again, look at the simulation/host boundary.
I am not strictly bound by simulation time. I can wind the simulation forward, I can restore it back to a previous state. I am outside of simulation time because I can play it back and forth like a tape in a drive, it's "time" is to me merely "location".
Being "outside of time" doesn't mean there is no time dimension for the agent, it just means that the time dimension of the observer being invoked is more a "locational" dimension for the entity being observed.
This is an interesting way to think about time, but from a religious perspective it is of little value; A posited observer (or even creator) in the form of a supra-dimensional intelligence is nothing like the Gods proposed by any major religion, and does nothing to help answer the question of origins - even if a higher dimensional being made the four dimensional block universe, we still need to understand the origins of that higher dimensional being - the question isn't being adressed, it's just kicking the can down the road.
Even so, I am going to dispute your claim that simulation creators are "nothing like" the proposed religious gods. Religions are just the result of people thinking about the simulation/host divide without having a simulation/host divide to directly observe.
Indeed, such creators have omnipotence after a fashion (through direct memory access), and omniscience too (also through direct memory access). These are limited, interestingly, by the same things that limit us: they cannot yet observe a location that has not been generated within the system any more than we can, so if they haven't already calculated our future in the way the system calculated its future, they can't know it any more than we do (excepting scripted events, but even the event triggering event is going to be impossible to predict without simply observing it as it is).
I could, for instance (and have) engaged in thought experiments wherein i "play the part of a hypothetical creator of a hypothetical universe" in such a way the cosmology actually resembles the christian cosmology well enough.
Moreover, the concerns philosophically dealt with by observations about that boundary inform exactly the discussions religious folks wish to have in terms of ie, Pascal's Wager.