On this page I will lay out the world as I perceive it. You may find it interesting or not. If not, then ok, see ya round sometime. If you do find it interesting I would appreciate your comments. I will try to find a way to include readers comments somehow.

Enough time wasted on premiminaries, lets get into the first problem: The Nature of reality.

Time And Time Again

Life, The Universe and Everything

I know not where or how the universe unfolds. But I have learned that it is not as it seems at first glance. The universe is a more strange and complex place than people would think. Space, time and even reality itself are intertwined in a way that belies our common sense understanding.

To start with, space and time themselves are just different aspects of the same thing. Everything exists as a unified whole from the end to the beginning from one side to the other. It is a there as one unified structure. The flow from past to future is merely the effect of our consciousness proceeding through an already existing time.

When looking at it as a whole the flow of time becomes meaningless, just an illusion. Even to ask when did the universe begin becomes as meaningless as asking where did it begin. It simply is.

That would seem to imply that we have no free will, that we merely experience a future that already exists. And that we have no choice in its outcome. This deterministic view seems to be at odds with our experience. Why?

When we look at the world on the sub microscopic scale we enter the realm of quantum mechanics and uncertainty. Try to measure the position and velocity of an atom and you find that there is an inherent uncertainty to that measurement. That uncertainty is a basic part of the structure of the universe. You just cant pin things down to exactly where they are or where they are going.

What does this imply for us? Take any group of atoms large or small and try to predict their movement into the future. You find that the small uncertainties quickly balloon out into total uncertainty. So beyond a certain point you just cant predict the future.

To us that means that the universe is not deterministic but completely open, and we have complete free will. How do we reconcile these two facts? Both are true and both are needed to explain the universe as we see it. But they are completely contradictory. Or are they?

My view is that the structure of space and time contains all of the possibilities inherent in uncertainty. In that it’s a richer and more complex place than we see. Present but unseen is all that might be and all that might have been. Yes the future is there but in a complex form. All we do is chart our coarse through this myriad of possibilities.

The complexity of the universe also applies to the past. Reverse the arrow of time and try to move backward. The quantum uncertainty still holds and we have no fixed path to follow. We find there are an infinite number of possibilities that could have lead to the present. Our memory merely records the complex path we followed on our way here.

What does this say for reality? Our past, present and future are very individual things as we chart our way through space and time. What we see is but our interpretation of the way things are. It is our own unique perspective on reality. All of the other possibilities are still there. We just don’t see them. Or do we?

If all we see is merely a case of our viewpoint what is to stop us from changing our mind and viewing it from a different perspective?

The implications are both intriguing and awesome.