IJesusChrist wrote:David the definition of 1-dimension would immidiately mean that no, you could never shrink down so that the 1-dimensional point 'grows'.
It's odd, but quantum mechanics says there is an ultimate small distance - a quanitfiable measurable distance that can not be broken up in any smaller peices - the planck length. Go figure.
It all sounds like a world of abstract fiction to me. The bottom line is that if something exists in the 3-dimensional physical world, then it necessarily possesses dimensions of some kind. And if it possesses dimensions of some kind, then it can be broken down further into its component parts, at least by our minds.
IJesusChrist wrote:David the definition of 1-dimension would immidiately mean that no, you could never shrink down so that the 1-dimensional point 'grows'.
It's odd, but quantum mechanics says there is an ultimate small distance - a quanitfiable measurable distance that can not be broken up in any smaller peices - the planck length. Go figure.
It all sounds like a world of abstract fiction to me. The bottom line is that if something exists in the 3-dimensional physical world, then it necessarily possesses dimensions of some kind. And if it possesses dimensions of some kind, then it can be broken down further into its component parts, at least by our minds.
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Dimensions are simply a way in which we perceive things. They are not arbitrary. "Basis" is also not arbitrary. I can easily say that 2 dimensional things are the basis of all things.
It's odd, but quantum mechanics says there is an ultimate small distance - a quanitfiable measurable distance that can not be broken up in any smaller peices - the planck length. Go figure.
Carmel:
This is incorrect. Science supports infinity on both the micro(quantum) and macro(infinite universe) levels.
David Quinn wrote:
What you posit here is contradictory in nature, beause after affirming that all things are devoid of any intrinsic reality, you then immediately change tack and affirm that at least one thing possesses intrinsic reality - namely, cognizant awareness.
There is no contradiction here, for that which is real is not a ‘thing’. Things (dharma) you see are composite: the result of the coming together of certain causes (operative and substantive) and conditions, and so have only a contingent (relative) existence. Conversely, that which is real partakes of a necessary (absolute) existence, and is not put together. That things are composite in nature is evident in the etymological origin of the term: the Anglo Saxon notion of a deliberate assembly or gathering together.
The teaching of no-nature is a standard principle in Buddhism, from the early texts, such as the Diamond Sutra, to the later sayings and writings of the Japanese Zen Masters.
Again, the doctrine states that there is no ‘self-inhering self (nature)’, and not that there is no-self at all; a metaphysical stance that would be indistinguishable from nihilism. For this reason it is said that the true nature of things is beyond words (ineffable), for we cannot predicate any ‘thing’ of that which is not made up of other subsidiary things.
It's odd, but quantum mechanics says there is an ultimate small distance - a quanitfiable measurable distance that can not be broken up in any smaller peices - the planck length. Go figure.
Carmel:
This is incorrect. Science supports infinity on both the micro(quantum) and macro(infinite universe) levels.
Wikipedia wrote:Contrary to statements sometimes found in the popular press, there is no evidence to suggest that distances in space are quantized in units of the Planck length.
My bad, I thought that was a rather ridiculous idea. It would seem almost counter-intuitive for space to have a limit to how small things can be. We just need a better way to measure things, light is too powerful, electrons have too much mass.
Everything in a man life is the truth. It is his truth. Individual man formed it, live it, and cultivate it in their children continuously. When I speak of their children, I am not speaking of those conceived by physical intercourse. Man's true children are his thoughts. There is never a second which goes by in the continuum of man's life when he is not the birth mother and father of his thoughts. Thoughts are the true children of man, and what determinations, what by-products of that which man has absorped, cling to, and detremine to be directional for himself is the way man raises his thought children which determines, what, when, where, why, and who he will be, and how his life is, and why he treats, and is treated by his thought children going out, finding they place, and returning home with the rewards and burdens of his teaching, and his acceptance of those teaching.
Yes, everything man lives is the truth. It is the truth in this sense . The Principle and Pattern of this universe is everything after its kind. Consciousness does not know the difference between big and small, good or evil, right or wrong, dimensions, spheres, levels, or realms. Consciousness knows only of the intent of thought sent forth, even when man himself does not know that intent. And so, when man cries out where was God when, or why me, or this or that? he should realize the Principles and Patterns which govern Life does not change, neither does Principles and Patterns which govern that within the living of Life. All which takes place in man's life is done according to the Principles and Patterns of Consciousness's intent and purpose. So whether man believes, or understands the Principle and Pattern of Consciousness, be assured all that Consciousness can do concerning the whole of mankind, or individual man, is to give unto one and all what is asked for in words, deeds, and thoughts whole. perfect, complete and pure because it is the law of the Spirit of life of the Principle and Pattern of infinity, on into infinity..
All the smartness, arrogance, self-righteousness man displays towards himself and other is his just reward. These rewards come in all ways men perceived to be good and evil. So when a man say why me, the answer is why not you, you set your circumstances, conditions, and situations in motions according to the intent of thought you conceived and raised. They cannot return to you void. They are your reality. Man does not get away with anything in this world. It always comes back to fulfill its return journey. And since that which is physical is attached to man's thoughts and interpretations, inclusive of physical children, family, friends, and loved ones, they are also affected in your conscious world of thinking. This is why man is told be careful what you say and do, for the small, large, and intent of that which you set in motion will return after many days whole, perfect, complete, and pure without discrimination in your conscious world of thoughts.
Measurement is of necessity to man's thinking, intent, and purpose of believing in that which is illogical, because there is no logic for the existence.
Never give power to anything a person believes is their source of strength - jufa
Carmel wrote:David:
We can't talk about reality being empty or full, just as we can't talk about it being large or small.
Carmel:
ok, but then...
David:
That is how "empty" it is.
Carmel:
...or how "full" it is? Did you choose the word "empty", as opposed to "full" arbitrarily or intentionally?
Intentionally. Reality is so empty that it is even empty of emptiness.
(I hope that makes sense... :)
It's really just another way of pointing to the non-dual nature of Reality. Dualistic categories such as "empty" or "full", "large" or "small", "something" or "nothing", "finite" or "infinite", etc, cannot be applied to it.
It sounds like nihilism on the surface, but there is a positive aspect to it, and uncovering that positive aspect, to be able to understand it and integrate it into one's life, is what enlightened wisdom is all about.
David Quinn wrote:The teaching of no-nature is a standard principle in Buddhism, from the early texts, such as the Diamond Sutra, to the later sayings and writings of the Japanese Zen Masters.
Again, the doctrine states that there is no ‘self-inhering self (nature)’, and not that there is no-self at all; a metaphysical stance that would be indistinguishable from nihilism. For this reason it is said that the true nature of things is beyond words (ineffable), for we cannot predicate any ‘thing’ of that which is not made up of other subsidiary things.
Many people are afraid to empty their minds lest they plunge into the Void. They do not know that their own Mind is the void. The ignorant eschew phenomena but not thought; the wise eschew thought but not phenomena. When everything inside and outside, bodily and mental, has been relinquished; when, as in the Void, no attachments are left; when all action is dictated purely by place and circumstance; when subjectivity and objectivity are forgotten - that is the highest form of relinquishment.
Ok, not 1 dimensional, but not zero either. Somewhere in between. These are inherently ambiguous specks of energy, they have no discernible dimension, yet they somehow exist. It doesn't get any smaller than these guys.
Science will end up finding out that one can delve endlessly into anything, and were they to shrink to the same relative size the universe would appear the same. Within an atom there are stars and worlds, and so on for quarks, strings or whatever might be called a smaller part. This is because the universe and time are both infinite, and such things are merely older forms of what we now see from our observation point in time. It is like a hologram wherein the form of any segment is approximately the same as the whole.
To think that there are smallest absolute particles of matter that are not caused, is not logical. If they are caused then they must consist of even smaller parts. If they always existed then they could not be subject to ANY change, which would make them incapable of interacting with anything else and evolving into larger things (no part within them could merge with the outside).
If the universe is infinite in an outward sense, then by default it must also be infinite in an inward sense, albeit that there will be a mobius strip/entanglement situation occurring. Delving into an electron on this earth may lead you to an "non-electron" somewhere else in space.
The universe is like an infinite tree, that has only one (non-locatable) root, namely (past) time, and one trunk that is Space. One branch just leads to another older branch, not to the trunk or roots, as these are hidden inside every part of the tree. The tree’s energy source and food for further growth is present time, which is akin to energy of the sun. Like light, what present time does is to break apart the past, allowing it to reform in different ways, just as a tree uses water, wind and nutrients and its current evolved form, in concert with sun’s light to grow.
I have always said that there is the smallest scale, and it could be the plank size which would fill an atom probably, and allow the electron to have an orbit. Some posts around here are going for the infinite smallest scale, and that an atom can contain a universe. Then it occurred to me that sentience, and intelligence also scale down. Humans have a large head to occupy a large enough brain for them to gain knowledge. This brain size scales down to dogs, cats, insects, and bacteria. Each time the scale goes down, the intelligence goes down with it. I think that a universe inside an atom would contradict this phenomenon. The large human head causes all sorts of problems in birth, and if there were a natural option for intelligence at a smaller scale then I think that nature would use it. So I would say that this is more evidence that there is a scale minimum to nature.
David Quinn wrote:Many people are afraid to empty their minds lest they plunge into the Void. They do not know that their own Mind is the void. The ignorant eschew phenomena but not thought; the wise eschew thought but not phenomena. When everything inside and outside, bodily and mental, has been relinquished; when, as in the Void, no attachments are left; when all action is dictated purely by place and circumstance; when subjectivity and objectivity are forgotten - that is the highest form of relinquishment.
- Huang Po
David, I fail to see the relevance of the quoted passage as Master Po does not define what is meant by the term ‘the Void’ (emptiness). Perhaps you can put forward another passage that more clearly supports your claim.
jupiviv wrote:The concept of things lacking inherent existence itself lacks inherent existence. That solves the dilemma.
Indeed it does lack any self-inhering existence, but it exists nevertheless, and so the dilemma remains.
This proves that you don't understand what the concept of things lacking inherent existence even means. The concept of emptiness is simply another way of stating that things are caused, which is why they have nature in the first place. But the infinite, or God, is not caused, because it never was not. Therefore it lacks a nature. Rather, it is nature itself. The reason why logic holds true everywhere is that the logical entities(everything) are simply pieces carved out of the infinite.
We may find that as small as we look "Matter" simply becomes a fleeting tangibility - the smaller we look, the smaller it seems to become. The larger we look, the larger space seems to become - space as in distance.
I was conflicted with the idea of a planck length being the smallest scale - I'm glad that has been over ruled, or atleast not believed to be true by the majority of scientists in that field.
It is odd though, that matter is so ... invisible.
David Quinn wrote:
What if we were to shrink our perspective down indefinitely? I presume these entities would also have to shrink indefinitely as well, in order to maintain the appearance of a constant size. Which would mean that your thought-experiment here doesn't really negate the idea of reality being infinite, after all.
You mean zoom out? What happens when we zoom out? Well, the reason these little particles appeared to begin with was because we zoomed in on the microcosm to the point where we reached a threshold, and once this threshold is reached, these little specks blink into existence. So when you zoom back out, it's just a matter of zooming out to a certain point (the threshold) at which these specks just disappear - they don't shrink, they just blink out of existence. They don't shrink indefinitely, it's either they appear or they don't appear. It's very black and white with these guys. They are there, or they are not there. There is no shrinking or anything like that.
For some reason, you are exempting these "guys" from everything else in the world, in that you're saying that their appearance, unlike everything else, doesn't enlarge when we move closer to them. The question is, why?
Also, you seem to be placing an arbitrary barrier on how small our perspective can theoretically go. What is to stop our perspective from theoretically shrinking beyond the threshold, beyond the "guys", and shrinking down even further?
David Quinn wrote:
What if we were to shrink our perspective down indefinitely? I presume these entities would also have to shrink indefinitely as well, in order to maintain the appearance of a constant size. Which would mean that your thought-experiment here doesn't really negate the idea of reality being infinite, after all.
You mean zoom out? What happens when we zoom out? Well, the reason these little particles appeared to begin with was because we zoomed in on the microcosm to the point where we reached a threshold, and once this threshold is reached, these little specks blink into existence. So when you zoom back out, it's just a matter of zooming out to a certain point (the threshold) at which these specks just disappear - they don't shrink, they just blink out of existence. They don't shrink indefinitely, it's either they appear or they don't appear. It's very black and white with these guys. They are there, or they are not there. There is no shrinking or anything like that.
For some reason, you are exempting these "guys" from everything else in the world, in that you're saying that their appearance, unlike everything else, doesn't enlarge when we move closer to them. The question is, why?
Also, you seem to be placing an arbitrary barrier on how small our perspective can theoretically go. What is to stop our perspective from theoretically shrinking beyond the threshold, beyond the "guys", and shrinking down even further?
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Nothing could propagate if you shrank any further. Light is a wave through a substance, so the substance wouldn't be there to create light.. same with sound, same with everything. You end up with a single lego brick, what can you build with it? You can break it, and it causes an explosion, and you get the electron, and the photon, but you can't break the electron, and the photon as they are plasma... they just fade away, maybe until they pop back again.
Pincho Paxton wrote:Nothing could propagate if you shrank any further. Light is a wave through a substance, so the substance wouldn't be there to create light.. same with sound, same with everything. You end up with a single lego brick, what can you build with it? You can break it, and it causes an explosion, and you get the electron, and the photon, but you can't break the electron, and the photon as they are plasma... they just fade away, maybe until they pop back again.
Well, this discussion has been a purely theoretical one. But you're right in saying that there are practical limits on how far we can physically shrink our perspective.
Theoretically, though, there is no reason why the world can't be composed of things on an increasingly smaller scale. To assert that it can't is really a form of anthropomorphism. At the moment, physicists like to assume that the quantum realm is the smallest possible realm (for some reason, they always want to feel that their work is of a fundamental nature), but it wasn't too long ago when they assumed this of the atomic realm.
David Quinn wrote:It's really just another way of pointing to the non-dual nature of Reality. Dualistic categories such as "empty" or "full", "large" or "small", "something" or "nothing", "finite" or "infinite", etc, cannot be applied to it.
It sounds like nihilism on the surface, but there is a positive aspect to it, and uncovering that positive aspect, to be able to understand it and integrate it into one's life, is what enlightened wisdom is all about.
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"Positive" is one-half of a dualistic category; how can that which is of dualism enlighten? Light (Pure Awareness) is without categories of any kind.
Pincho Paxton wrote:Nothing could propagate if you shrank any further. Light is a wave through a substance, so the substance wouldn't be there to create light.. same with sound, same with everything. You end up with a single lego brick, what can you build with it? You can break it, and it causes an explosion, and you get the electron, and the photon, but you can't break the electron, and the photon as they are plasma... they just fade away, maybe until they pop back again.
Well, this discussion has been a purely theoretical one. But you're right in saying that there are practical limits on how far we can physically shrink our perspective.
Theoretically, though, there is no reason why the world can't be composed of things on an increasingly smaller scale. To assert that it can't is really a form of anthropomorphism. At the moment, physicists like to assume that the quantum realm is the smallest possible realm (for some reason, they always want to feel that their work is of a fundamental nature), but it wasn't too long ago when they assumed this of the atomic realm.
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I don't think it even works theoretically. Imagine the Big Bang for example. You need to move everything in one big explosion. yet movement is now infinitely small. So the tiny steps of the explosion are actually stationary for infinity.. nothing moves at all. The only way that your idea can work is if everything is 0D, and movement is an illusion, the falling energy levels are distance. Then energy has to have a minimum end, and can't be infinitely small else you have the same problem. Actually you would need 3 explosions, 1 for X,Y. and Z. 0D isn't beyond possibility though, it's just a bit weird.
jupiviv wrote:The concept of things lacking inherent existence itself lacks inherent existence. That solves the dilemma.
Indeed it does lack any self-inhering existence, but it exists nevertheless, and so the dilemma remains.
This proves that you don't understand what the concept of things lacking inherent existence even means. The concept of emptiness is simply another way of stating that things are caused, which is why they have nature in the first place. But the infinite, or God, is not caused, because it never was not. Therefore it lacks a nature. Rather, it is nature itself. The reason why logic holds true everywhere is that the logical entities(everything) are simply pieces carved out of the infinite.
Yes, things partake of only a relative (contingent) existence, whereas that which is real partakes of an absolute (necessary) existence. So what aspect of this two-fold nature is it that you think I do not understand?
IJesusChrist wrote:Whoever gave into the assumption that we can go no further than the photon is going to be happily mistaken.
Why do you believe these are the ultimate building blocks? Simply because we can't see any smaller?! That's ridiculous!
Well the Aether is between you, and your TV, and is touching your eyes, and going inside your body. It is between you, and the horizon in the far distance, and it is between you and the moon through a telescope, and it is between you, and the end of the universe. something so invisible as the Aether surely can't get smaller than its apparent none existence? When we break it is a photon, and electron as its two halves. The light that you see is its explosion from being broken. If you can imagine smaller than invisible, smaller than something invisible even when it is scaled to the ends of the Universe then you have a good imagination.
It's so invisible that it has been erased from science because nobody could find it, and yet it was used in science for hundreds of years. Yet it is packed from end to end like we are encased in a block of glass, we still can't find it.
