Wednesday 10 November 2010

Philosophy of Time and Space

The most important issue facing the United States of America is not who will become the President but how soon will alternative heating, lighting and motor energies enable the recreation of the economy as China become the mass production centre of the world. Watching John Snow as he travelled the 1000 miles of West Coast America this evening he suggested ways in which the nation might be changing to maintain its economic edge over China and compete profitable with the Europe and remain the world's greatest capitalist economy once the recession is overcome.

The first was a sustainable population base which included a sufficient stream of talented young people who formed the creative entrepreneurial force fuelling the economy, and surprisingly suggested that in addition to providing a competitive work in the lower paid service industries, the Latino migration might need to be stimulated as well as controlled. There are parallels with the arrival of about 1 million people from Poland to the UK since the extension to the E.E.C and the concern being expressed that their departure will have adverse effects on the British economy unless there is a significant change in the level of education and the approach to work of about a fifth British school leavers each year. John Snow visited a school in a poor neighbourhood gang ridden area which had its own police security services but was being transformed with a million dollar decorative make over which was hoped to change a situation where only a fifth left school with the basics of education attractive to employers. own police force. A key element of the Barack campaign is the need for a programme which addressed the costs of higher education which disabled sections of the community with potential for contributing to economic growth.

His visit to Seattle underlined that positive nature of the relationship with China as the total export from Washington State was greater than the imports and where people of Chinese and Asian origin now formed fifteen percent of the population and where one recent governor was of the descendent of third generation who had come to the America to be a servants and to wash dishes while learning the languages and lifestyle. However the problems as with the rest of Europe that the trade involved the exporting of production jobs to China, India and other developing economies and will consequential impact on the jobs and lives of the workers and their families displaced. Interestingly Senator McCain is more committed to free trade and Senator Obama to Protectionism.

It was difficult to accept the generalizations being made based on single interviews John Snow also visited a church which meets in a school assembly hall and where the pastor criticised the way George Bush had identified one form of Christianity with his party, suggesting a moral superiority in addition to economic. This church prayed for a global Christianity among a world of different faiths and expressed concern at the way Christianity had been hijacked by politicians in a particular way. Until then he had not found evidence of any significant change in lifestyle required in an economy over dependent on externally supplied energy and needing to reduce the overall level to combat the effects of global warming. He visited I believe in Portland a growing community in Portland who are attempting a major qualitative lifestyle change on a large scale although the extent of this project was not spelt out and there have always been small communities attempting to live according to different values from the mainstream. Such projects are important but there are two development which could make the difference, the first is the alternative to oil for use with the combustion engine and he visited an enterprise who have developed a sports car able to travel from 0 to 60 within a few seconds operating on a battery giving a mileage of 250. However the firm are in the process of developing a saloon vehicle with a greater range which could be start of the change from the combustion engine to battery and eventually solar power. One feels that no significant change will be made until batteries can be charged as they are driven given the usual recharge time required.

His other visit, which in my judgement was the most significant, was to a firm trying to develop solar energy receptors and converters which could provide the heating and power source energy on the kind of scale and at a price which not just reduced dependency on overseas oil but changed the balance in energy use and impact on the environment. For me the future of humanity on planet earth is presently finite and its future will depend on space travel, and possibly the existence of intelligence at higher level of development than human.

This brings me to the substantive Wikipedia article about the Philosophy of Space and Time and which involves questions such as do space and time exist independently of the mind and whether they exist independently of each other. And to questions of dimensions other than the four of breadth, depth, width and time, and about individual identity especially the nature of identity over time.

For a long period of time during my life I was in disarray because I thought that that proponents of diametrically opposed propositions were right, and I had no means of explaining this to myself or anyone else. I was more inclined to idealism than scientific realism. Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason which I attempted to read and understand as part of my Ruskin Diploma course in Politics and Economics before I changed to Public and Social Administration, argues that things like space and time are mind created systematic frameworks to enable us to understand and make sense of our experience but question their existence independently of individual perception and individual understanding.

At the time I was much affected by the problems of number and how number was also a construction to help understand the world perceived as external to ourselves. If you divide 1 by 3 you get .3333333 recurring, but if you multiply .3 by 3 you get.9, you multiply.33 by 3 you get .99 and so on indefinitely. So where is the missing .11111? Number is therefore a concept we can communicate to others and which we can use to count and to measure but is only an approximation and device to explain and work on aspects of external reality. Yesterday I talked of the reality of a box and raised whether it exists independently of those who perceive it, arguing that it did because I could see and describe and move away and forget my knowledge of it, but others could continue to view that experience throughout eternity if it was projected/transmitted at the same time as when I viewed and continued after I ceased viewing, or was recorded and subsequently transmitted, or because others could establish that the box continued to exist in the form I had seen and touched and where their description at different times was identical to mine.

I have become a realist by thought and experience, believing that time and space not only exists independently of my own mind, and of all other human minds, but have always existed and will always continue to exist as they did before human beings on earth evolved and after they do not exist on earth.

I also accept that the way we presently understand the extent of the universe within the totality of space and the position and the movement of components of the universe has only been described by human beings, and that it is irrational to presume that there are no other beings existing or who have existed or will exist who possess greater understanding and ability to explain and describe the nature of the universe, and its space and time, or to assume that we will not be able to communicate with such beings because of their ability to travel through space and time, or our future ability to do so.

The first and best example of this is the assumption usually made that we can only move forward in time. At present my movement between Newcastle and London is governed by the known maximum speed of flight as is my potential movement to the Moon or to the Planet Mars. If I develop ways to escalate the speed of travel to better than a second a second, to say two seconds a second and I travel up and down over the same spot for a period one hour, then I will arrive back 30 minutes into the future of everyone who has not travelled. In theory therefore if I travel up and down for one year at the speed of two seconds a second, I will return a year ahead in time of everyone else and theoretical I should also be to travel back in time, as when we film an event we can then play it backwards whether with a traditional tape film or a digital DVD and we can do this endlessly and if something falls and breaks we can witness it being reassembled. However in our present direct experience we cannot recreate a once broken glass, a feat accomplished by Merlin in the film yesterday when he spilt the contents of a container and used magic to reverse what happened. We will not need magic if we travel back as well as ward faster than the present measurement of time
At the present time we can remember what has happened in the past, individually and collectively but we are limited in terms of predicting the future, although as with weather forecasting, tide tables and other phenomenon previously considered beyond prediction significant progress has and is being made. We have also been able to measure the age of things going back thousands and hundred of thousands of years. So while we now think of time as only having a forward movement in terms of unknown things about to happen and measuring what has previously happened, it is irrational to suppose that human or other being will not devise ways of both predicting future behaviour with increasing accuracy and of proving such predictions by moving forward in time and moving back.

I have touched on the question of perception and consciousness but not the subconscious or the main questions about the nature of individual identity and changes in identity.

I converted myself to the view that in addition to our immediate self awareness and memory we retain an awareness and memory of everything that has gone before in our lives and that these memories govern our immediate thoughts, feelings and actions as much. and at times significantly greater than we are able to recall. I also believe that the genetic coding which we pass on, as others have passed on to us, contain memories of the experience of our ancestors and their ancestors accumulatively. I again use the similarity of the computer hard drive which has a maximum capacity which once reached overlays areas with new information and it is the overlaid information which can be recalled by current programmes, but it is also possible to detect what has been overlaid. I believe that this is also so for the human brain and where the individual composition of storage, retrieval and reproducing information varies because of different histories and external stimulation as well as variations in construction and programmes.

It is presently possible to clone animals where the evidence is they are physically identical and physically behave as the master creature. Will this also apply to the human being? If the physical clone is absolutely identical with no variation will the depository of ancestral knowledge and experience also be precisely identical and how much variation will occur because of differences in time, with the clone commencing their existence after the master and consequently l possess a very different set of external influences and information to the original. Both being are physically identical but they can be said to operate in different dimension.

For me it is factual that human beings now operate in different dimensions with the most important the dimension of external reality which others can describe in ways which confirms an existence separate from individual perception. The same individual also operate in a dimension when their perception is influenced by conscious and stored data which can distort the perception of time which can appear slower or faster. The same being can also live in the dimension of his and his ancestral past and which may or may not be identical or similar to the external reality and internalised perception at the original time. The same individual can live in the different dimension created by the mechanism of waking dream where individuals have some awareness and some memory. It is known that the internal visual and audio memory also continues when the individual is asleep and is not self aware and this is observable by others when a subject sleep walks, speaks and acts. And similar even when an individual is static and asleep it possible to measure ongoing brain activity to demonstrate the likelihood that the internal visual and audio motor is continuing. It also known that the organs of individuals can shut down all or part for short and long periods and return to full self consciousness and awareness even if they are not always able to communicate this. These are all separate and different dimensional states.

It I also theoretically possible for individuals to be propelled forward and backwards at a faster rate than time is normal measured and therefore they will arrive at a different time point before or after their journey commenced depending on the speed and it is also theoretically possible for the two states to continue in parallel just as when a human being is cloned it is the same human being in terms physical structure and this should or may also include identical ancestral information and memory projected into the present, but subsequently a clone will experience and respond to a different array of stimuli in a different external environment. This presently explains why identical twins can think feel and behave in similar ways of they are brought up together over the same period of time and in the same environment and they can also possess significant similarities but also differences if they are brought up by different people in different environments.

The description of an identity is the inherited physical and psychological structural which in my view includes all the accumulation of ancestral information and memory which has been transferred together with the accumulation of stored inputs as a life progresses. Therefore aspects of the identity change with the accumulation of information and experience and which occurs in different dimensional condition.

In previous writings I have also suggested that recent developments in the ability to experience and record the behaviour and speech of others at a distance via digital transmission presently between the earth and points in space and back via orbital satellites and manned projectiles reveal the possibility that everything we do and say can be experienced anytime, anywhere and by anyone with the technology to do so in so far as human beings based on planet earth, but this being so why is not possible by other human type being or intelligent and self aware beings across the universe and given the infinite nature of the universe then what we say and do can be said to continue top exist for eternity as well as in out individual memory banks as well as in the memory banks of all those with whom we shared experience.

I have also argued that in addition to the accumulated information and experience stored in individual brains there is the accumulation of interactive experience which has a totality greater than any individual combinations and becomes more than the total; of the separate contributions, and that this takes the form of accumulated banks of goodness and badness which can effect what happens with a society or between societies for varying periods of time depending on how the individuals and societies then respond.

It is also my belief that some individuals because of the nature of their brain and the way all or parts of that brain functions, and because of the way they have been raised or because of what happens to them are able to draw upon their individual memories and experiences and those of others in such a way that there are physical manifestations are created. Is my contention that the power of the individual brain can affect the actual physical world external to them as well as the perceptions of other to the external world. There is whole area of minds being controlled and manipulated via audio and visual interventions and by external drugs as well as by internal; mechanisms. These powers lead to ghosts an other apparitions and to communications with ancestors in a direct way as well as to other living beings which those being may not be aware of.

For the moment and I suspect the rest of my being I am content just to explore the four dimension within my brain with occasional forays to places previously experienced and meetings and contact with others known at different periods of time.

There was quite a lot of sport on television today with two Premiership football matches, an NFL match played at Wembley and the second warm up cricket match in the Stanford 10 million twenty million dollar series playing in the West. Indies and which I watched part of the England innings and that of Middlesex who came within a few runs of winning on a difficult wicket where everyone has been putting down catches.

I was surprised to find a second Antiques Road show coming from Southwell and I relaxed with a new Frost which had one twist. I enjoyed watching a Bergerac which I have seen at least twice before, I cooked a whole chicken for a late lunch with the some roast potatoes which were crispy and more enjoyable together with the remaining carrots and peas which I had with two pork chops yesterday. This was followed by a par and this evening I had two mini apple pies with custard after an olive salad. I had a toasted tomato sandwich for tea.

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