Midwinter wrote:

It's a problem with definitions, as you address further
below. Right here, in fact, after the snippage:

That concept deserves a name. It's been ``universe'' until
recently, but I think we can safely use Sagan's ``Cosmos'' now
that the universal waters have been so muddied.

Such questions deserve to be addressed whether or not the Big Bang
Theory accounts for all that Is.

And the fact of the matter is that such questions are ultimately
unknowable, for the exact same reason that the Halting Problem is
unsolvable.

Let's take a radical example. The Universe, from the Bang to
today, is a computer simulation. And not just a cheap simulation
like in the Matrix, but one that accounts for every particle /
photon / whatever down to Planck scale for all of time. We would
have no way of knowing if such is the case, could not possibly
determine if that's the case, unless the Programmers decided to
let us in on the joke.

But even if they did...they themselves have no way of knowing
whether or not /they're/ also being simulated themselves on some
sort of trans-hyper computer. And so on.

For the proof, see the proof of the Halting Problem and use the
tiniest smidge of extrapolation.

Anyway, at this point, one should start to realize that it's
meaningless to speak of the ``real'' reality, or its true nature
or some such. All reality is equally real, whether or not it's an
apparent emergent property of some underlying construct. Some
realities are richer than others, sure -- the inhabitants of Sim
City, for example, are profoundly simple. But they /are/ real, and
as real as you or I.

Again, it's a matter of definitions. But, in this case, I think
you'll come to realize that ``you'' are really a continuum. Are
you the same person as you were when you were an infant, a
toddler, a teenager? On the one hand, most emphatically not, and
on the other, unquestionably so.

At what frequency of light does blue become green?

And, does it even matter? What if the simulation isn't even
running, and we are forever unknowingly frozen in this one eternal
moment of the perpetual now, created as we are and destined never
to move? Perhaps we're a point in time snapshot backup that will
never be re-loaded. But does that alter the reality that it
/seems/ to us that we're advancing into the future at sixty
minutes to the hour? And, just as with all other questions of the
``real'' reality, doesn't it make sense to say that we /are/
traveling through time, even if that be a ``mere'' illusion?

The true brilliance of the greatest thinkers of the past century
or so -- Cantor, Einstein, Godel, Turing, Shannon, etc. -- is in
recognizing that /nobody's/ special; the same limits apply to all
of us, even though some are in a better position to exploit
certain resources than others.

And if that isn't the most liberating and exhilarating thought of
all, I don't know what is.

Cheers,

b&

--
EAC Memographer
BAAWA Knight of Blasphemy
``All but God can prove this sentence true.''