FOR OUR SPECIFIC EXPERIMENT–SEE “THE EXPERIMENT” UNDER MENU IN THE UPPER RIGHT HAND CORNER OF THE HOME PAGE. Place a droplet of water on a surface and it will bunch up, take on the shape of a half sphere. That’s because water molecules are cohesive, partly meaning they have high surface tension in air. The water …
Category Archives: The Experiment
CONSCIOUSNESS: CONTINUOUS OR DISCONTINUOUS?
For something to exist, like an experience of awareness, part of an apparent continuous consciousness, there must be a relationship across at least one boundary (one difference in potential, or at least one signal/transfer of information). A relationship exists when we sample our environment and it responds to our sampling (the same can be said …
The Changing Climate of The Implicit
The idea here is that we can never know what is behind our observations, since, perhaps, we live in, as John Archibald Wheeler calls it, a participatory universe, the universe of the observer. Observers who sample at their RIGHT HERE AND RIGHT NOW then process the results, generalize about them, and give them meaning, only to “stash them …
Love and Loss
Is there a difference between reaching into the past to find someone you loved but can no longer reach and reaching into the future to find someone you love (or might love), but might never meet? Let me give you an example. People around me are forever mourning the loss of touch with a …
Identity
[I’m throwing out lots of ideas and questions here that I hope to clarify in later postings.] What if it’s not how we got to be us, but our unique configuration that determines our unique consciousness? So, does the shape, independent of anything else, determine our unique perspective? The above idea might make sense, …
Dimension: Change in Space and Time
[A quick review of SAMPLING: When one system relates to another across a boundary, they are said to be in relationship. They interact by co-sampling information that comes to them across their boundaries from the other system. Each system has a way of detecting the other system, and the information that transfers between systems …
The Expanding Universe
In “How Long? How Far?” we began to wonder about the different ways we see space and time, and how those aspects of the observable universe come into being.
If the observable universe was in the thin expanding rubber surface of a balloon (as opposed to the boundary of our two-dimensional expanding droplet) then as the distance from its center increases, the distance between it’s galaxies would increase.
The radius or distance from the center, as in our droplet experiment, might represent time (complexity or entropic state) and the surface area of the balloon might represent space. What we discover as duration increases (air is blown into the balloon) the ability for the galaxies to interact with one another decreases. Energy density between galaxies decreases, so in order to maintain more complex systems (which require greater durations of sampling to survive) new languages using lower forms of energy must evolve.
An example of new languages among primitive information exchanges might be the difference in energy density between the language transfer of physical chemistry (subatomic particles), chemistry (molecular bonding), and organic chemistry (the much smaller van de Waal forces (energy/information exchanges) between macromolecules).
This brings up the problem of virtual verses real. Is our universe virtual or real? When a new language is born of a lower potential for information transfer in the observable universe, are the virtual symbolism and the original manifested components (what we call the real) connected?
Are our thoughts connected to what we consider real? Is the word “Love” connected to the feeling?
This wonderment leads to the comparison of the ideas of “virtual” with “real” and then the pursuit of any connection between the two.
How long? How far?
One of the mysteries I’m trying to answer for myself is about the difference in measuring space and time.
Leading from my experiment on how an expanding droplet “learns to see” space and time, I will attempt to connect the concept to our own experiences of space and time.
For primitive boundaries how long in duration something lasts (the number of samples between actually sampling the target configuration (primitive sequential recognition) feeds into the “growth” of time.
The radius and circumference of boundary expansion is synonymous with the likelihood of sampling a configuration or statistical distribution.
High Curvature “Relationship”
A high curvature relationship occurs at the beginning and the end of our two-fluid experiment.
A tiny bubble has such a high curvature/small radius that it is difficult for random vibrations to deform it.
As the water-based fluid flows into the oil-based fluid, into the crests (fingers) of the unstable waves at the boundary, their tip radii get very small and their curvature very large, thus damping out vibrations there.
In both cases (beginning and end), the curvature at the boundary of the two-fluid system is so large that the boundary cannot be made to deform. In this case, there exists no relationship across the boundary. Therefore, no recognizable existence there.
Four Basic Kinds of Relationship
In our two-fluid experiment, where a water-based fluid tries to push an oil-based fluid out of the way across a boundary, we can describe four basic relationships. The first three relationships require a certain amount of interfacial tension at the boundary to carry interactive information from one fluid to another. The fourth and last relationship has little or no tension on the boundary. Molecular diffusion occurs and therefore we call it a degraded relationship, where, because of the static at the boundary, little information gets through. [continued]
The Union of Opposites 