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The Tomorrow People (or The Yesterday People)

DelphisBorn

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
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Mar 22, 2009
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Do paranormal phenomena (if they exist) represent the first far upstream wave of 30th Century superpsychics and obscure quantum and higher dimensional talents that life is only now beginning to learn how to work with?

Or..are they the remnant of a long distant past, when, for life to come into existence, weak quantum or other forces were perhaps in some way exploited, but have since been far outstripped or overshadowed by macroscopic forces of little relevance to the underlying weirdness and "nonlocality" etc. Are paranormal phenomena the last surviving remnant of the emergence of matter from very basic quantum states?
 
Are paranormal phenomena the last surviving remnant of the emergence of matter from very basic quantum states?

I was just thinking about this very thing when reading the following article the other day (it also had some other very interesting food for thought)..

This is where the fractal nature of the invariant set matters. Consider a place of interest you want to visit along a coastline. If you get the coordinates even slightly wrong you could end up in the sea rather than where you want to be. In the same way, if the hypothetical universe does not lie on the fractal, then that universe is not in the invariant set and so it cannot physically exist.

Due to the spare and wispy nature of fractals, even subtle changes in the hypothetical universes could cause them to fall outside the invariant set.
In this way, Spekkens says, Palmer's hypothesis may help to make some sense of quantum contextuality.

Can fractals make sense of the quantum world?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... tml?page=1

Anyhow, it got me to thinking about those slightly fuzzy areas in Mandelbrot patterns as possible areas where the paranormal may lie.
 
In the same way, if the hypothetical universe does not lie on the fractal, then that universe is not in the invariant set and so it cannot physically exist.

Could using this type of mathematics offer a method by which to find other universes in the invariant set?

Of course, that might have already been done -- only not here. ;)
 
QUESTioner said:

Anyhow, it got me to thinking about those slightly fuzzy areas in Mandelbrot patterns as possible areas where the paranormal may lie.

Hey sockpuppet, how are you doin? :lol:

Seriously though, I think one way to look at the paranormal is as gaps in so called "natural laws". Not sure I'm really buying the "invariant set" idea as applied to cosmology, or the universe as a whole. Not sure at all that mathematical descriptions exist in some Platonic (unconditional) sense, in fact.
 
Ok, well what I had in mind with the OP, in simpler language, is whether the paranormal is basically a foretaste of the future and is just "gearing up" so to speak, or whether it is some lingering trace of a (weak) ability way back at the dawn of evolution and is in its last stages of winding down before it disappears altogether.
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Matched pair of sock-puppets? :?

Umm, NO. Most definitely two different people. Although they are, to some extent, birds of a feather. Squark. ;)
 
QUESTioner said:
What is an 'invariant set'?

I don't know if anyone actually read the article that I posted, but it is explained within the context..
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127011.600-can-fractals-make-sense-of-the-quantum-world.html?page=1

...

As a system loses information, the number of states you need to describe it diminishes. Wait long enough and you will find that the system reaches a point where no more states can be lost. In mathematical terms, this special subset of states is known as an invariant set. Once a state lies in this subset, it stays in it forever.

A simple way of thinking about it is to imagine a swinging pendulum that slows down due to friction before eventually coming to a complete standstill. Here the invariant set is the one that describes the pendulum at rest.

...
A very interesting article. Is an invariant set, described as a fractal Universe, better, or worse, than, a replacement for, an 11 dimensional Multidimensional-Universe?

It all gets very confusing, very quickly. :confused:
 
In answer to the first question: in my opinion neither. "Time" is, at best, an explicit manifestation of one aspect of the weak nuclear force. In high enough temperatures, it would appear that this force could coalesce with electromagnetism, and become the electroweak force. This suggestion may point, tantalus-like, to a juncture where, given enough pressure and density, the four fundamental forces could act as a single coherent principle obligating, upon their initial separation, all fermions and bosons to behave in the way they do now. Let's leave top, bottom, strange, and charm out of this for the timebeing.

Hence, any anomalous / fortean / paranormal experiences are simply natural phenomena, that owing to our limited and imperfect understanding of the world around us, are misunderstood. They are as old as the universe itself, and would continue to occur even if there were no observers around to think: "how odd".
 
So it's a home for single minded badgers who don't do very much?
 
Hence, any anomalous / fortean / paranormal experiences are simply natural phenomena, that owing to our limited and imperfect understanding of the world around us, are misunderstood.

Perhaps you are correct, but then would you care to venture why these things have a 'trickterish' nature (well documented), evaporate upon empirical probing, and are otherwise 'mercurial?' This is very much quantum acting if you ask me, and that is why I posit that these things are possibilities which simply don't quite fit into the fractal set by which 'things form' (they are liminal and lay in sort of a nebulous 'no man's' land).

I would add that they very much shadow our deepest beliefs, fears, hopes, dreams, and as such suggest things which are attempting to be birthed by consciousness. However, I would not necessary place all preternatural phenomenon in this category - except for those which have tell tale signs of the above.
 
Thanks for the input. Personally, I don't really hold with the idea of a "top law" or a "theory of everything" etc, or (finally) even the concept of "law" in general, when unpacked sufficiently. This is probably, imo, an intellectual bottleneck that physics will have to go through and come out the other side again. I maintain that what we have in natural laws is a series of recalcitrant behaviors to a certain depth, which are inseparable from the actual playing out of the universe, including the development of consciousness within it. In other words, I take an evolutionary rather than Platonic (i.e. "mathematically transcendent") picture. However, if laws are not mathematically transcendent, then they are not really "laws"

I also don't think that time (or for that matter the universe in general) can be entirely separated from our conscious experience of it. The RNG data is evidence of this, and even though the effect is not big, that it is there at all should draw us up short.

IMO, one of the reasons that the paranormal may be so evanescent and avoidant of study, is because episodes of it represent transience moments of illegality in the universe's consensus rules for itself. But again, if these rules are ultimately conditional, as I believe they are, then there is, also, ultimately, no such thing as "illegality" but "opportunistic phenomena" which are, even if rarely, capable of breaking through the net of "agreed rules" that the cosmos has evolved for itself. Normally, these "natural laws" would repel them like an immune system repelling an opportunistic infection. They are antagonistic to a carefully balanced cohering framework that gives the semblance of holding the cosmos together.
 
_TMS_ said:
In answer to the first question: in my opinion neither. "Time" is, at best, an explicit manifestation of one aspect of the weak nuclear force. In high enough temperatures, it would appear that this force could coalesce with electromagnetism, and become the electroweak force. This suggestion may point, tantalus-like, to a juncture where, given enough pressure and density, the four fundamental forces could act as a single coherent principle obligating, upon their initial separation, all fermions and bosons to behave in the way they do now. Let's leave top, bottom, strange, and charm out of this for the timebeing.

Hence, any anomalous / fortean / paranormal experiences are simply natural phenomena, that owing to our limited and imperfect understanding of the world around us, are misunderstood. They are as old as the universe itself, and would continue to occur even if there were no observers around to think: "how odd".


Of Course! how stupid of me not to have realised this. All the time I had it down to the very hackneyed "Fnarg" principle, where a depleted Electro Motive Force weakens any installed fractal divisions based around the Mandelbrot Set normally boosted by distant acting boosters. I always took this top be the accepted thinking, but now, well, I feel EMPOWERED, Danke Shoen!
 
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