The Ultimate Riddle

If i am able to wake, then surely my previous state must have been sleeping. It follows then that if i am unconscious then surely i must have been conscious. This cycle of balance is evident in all we perceive. If i am alive then i surely must have been dead. Not the same as not existing because when i die i leave my body and it can be observed deteriorating. So When does my soul deteriorate? Are we not all bound to knowledge of our fore fathers, and merely need to recall that ancient wisdom of ages, or do we progress because what we learn is somewhat encoded in our genes. Either way we advance, become more structured more ethical and less chaotic. Wheres the entropy in this? If the universe is slowly becoming one. when all energy and matter has spent its last, when the space between interactions has become so vast that relativity ceases to exist and time becomes irrelevant because there are no two things to be relative to each other. Surely that is the ultimate structure, One. Just one. The absolute. And yet like a breath it too will have to return to something else.
Thoughts please

Originally posted by NOTGATE
If i am able to wake, then surely my previous state must have been sleeping. It follows then that if i am unconscious then surely i must have been conscious. This cycle of balance is evident in all we perceive. If i am alive then i surely must have been dead. Not the same as not existing because when i die i leave my body and it can be observed deteriorating ...[text shortened]... e absolute. And yet like a breath it too will have to return to something else.
Thoughts please

Tis true without lying, certain & most true.

That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do ye miracles of one only thing.

And as all things have been & arose from one by ye mediation of one: so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation.

Emerald Tablets of Toth - Translation of Issac Newton c. 1680.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/alc/emerald.htm

Originally posted by NOTGATE

First of all I try to make some structure so I can deal with your post:

my comments in italics


If i am able to wake, then surely my previous state must have been sleeping. It follows then that if i am unconscious then surely i must have been conscious.

yes. But to estimate the precise moment between sleeping and not sleeping might be very difficult to find. Compare the problem: Where am I exactly when I jump? I am not on the ground, since that would be before jumping, and I am not airborne yet, since that would be after jumping. (I have a maybe not convincing idea on this)

This cycle of balance is evident in all we perceive. If i am alive then i surely must have been dead.

No. I must have been "unliving". It would be the same to say if I erect a building it must have fallen down before, which is kind of ridiculous.

Not the same as not existing because when i die i leave my body and it can be observed deteriorating.

So you have to explain to us what exactly you mean by "i". There are people out there who do believe that all of our experience and emotion is "just" a chemical/elecrtical phenomenon. For them the body would be the "i".

So When does my soul deteriorate?

In comes without definition the concept of "soul" which is at least a very complex construct.[/I]

Are we not all bound to knowledge of our fore fathers, and merely need to recall that ancient wisdom of ages, or do we progress because what we learn is somewhat encoded in our genes.

[i]Completely new thought without apparent connection to the previous. And apparently defining a few things differently (but not explicitly) as before.

Either way we advance, become more structured more ethical and less chaotic.

Do we become more ethic? As person as society as humankind??? you should explain where you are.


[/i]Wheres the entropy in this?

And another new concept in the discussion about what entropy you are talking? system (you, your body, your body-soul? information? universe?

If the universe is slowly becoming one.

Hä? you should explain that before anything can be discussed. This is science forum not spirituality, so I take that you talk about acollapsing universe here?


when all energy and matter has spent its last, when the space between interactions has become so vast that relativity ceases to exist and time becomes irrelevant because there are no two things to be relative to each other.

So you talk about an infinite expanding universe, how does this become one? (previous statement)
Relativity has no boundray in geometrical distance. you can relate all distances regardless.
Plus you seem to imagine an equal distribution of matter, which is clearly not the case and won't be, you need some energy to break up the few chunks of matter clinging together today (Earth, sun, Voyager1...) how will that take place?


Surely that is the ultimate structure, One. Just one. The absolute. And yet like a breath it too will have to return to something else.
Thoughts please:

Please do pose the ultimate riddle, if you justa want some kind of philosophical/spiritual discussion find an appropriate thread. Thank you and I am open to further the discussion. Cheers

It's impossible for the space between interactions to be so vast that relativity ceases to exist - no matter the space the relativity is still there, and that's a fundamental logical flaw - exactly as saying to be alive you must have been dead - the antonyms just don't work logically.

It's the same as the fundamental flaw that Pythagoras joked about, when talking about throwing a stone in the air. Theory A: When THE STONE reaches its apex and begins its descent it is at a height of X, say 10m high; then to fall down it has to reach half way through its fall, X/2 or 5m. And then reach half way again, X/4 or 2.5m, and half way again, X/8 or 1.25m and half way again X/16 or 0.625m and so on ad infinitum. So it will always have to encounter the half way stage and, thus, it never hits the ground.

Yet we hear it hit the ground. The argument is fundamentally flawed, logically.
Same as the arguments in your OP. It doesn't have to reach the X/ y point, but it certainly has to pass through it! That's the real logical reasoning. It is the wording of such theories as Thoery A that causes illogical thought.

-m. 😉

Im not even going to pretend i understand all this but,
according to theories that predict proton decay, the stellar remnants left behind would disappear, leaving behind only black holes which themselves eventually disappear as they emit Hawking radiation.
If any of the Grand Unified theories are correct, then there are theoretical reasons to believe that the half-life of the proton is under 1041 years.[24] Neutrons bound into nuclei are also expected to decay with a half-life comparable to the proton's.
This means that the number of nucleons will be slashed in half 1,000 times by the time the universe is 10 to the 40 years old. Hence, there will be roughly ½ to the 1,000 (approximately 10−301) as many nucleons remaining as there are today; that is, zero nucleons remaining in the universe at the end of the Degenerate Age. Effectively, all baryonic matter will have been changed into photons and leptons.
Also if im right in thinking and i might not be, FD's are 4D fourier transforms of space time so there is no time variable.
Some cut and pastings there obviously.
It is correct however to say that there would still be relativity.
I see better the flaws in the statement now.
Thankyou for the enlightenment

Proponents of the soul hypothesis have so far been unable to substantially support their claim.

Originally posted by NOTGATE
Im not even going to pretend i understand all this but,
according to theories that predict proton decay, the stellar remnants left behind would disappear, leaving behind only black holes which themselves eventually disappear as they emit Hawking radiation.

Clearly you have heard some concepts but are unaware of their meaning, like "proton decay", "black hole" and "Hawking radiation". I would recommend browsing through the Wikipedia articles on these concepts.

Originally posted by NOTGATE
unconscious then surely i must have been conscious. This cycle of balance is evident in all we perceive.

Not necessarily; plants aren't "concious", yet they aren't unconcious either.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
Clearly you have heard some concepts but are unaware of their meaning, like "proton decay", "black hole" and "Hawking radiation". I would recommend browsing through the Wikipedia articles on these concepts.

maybe you would care to elaborate on where im going wrong, since this is the wikipedia articles on these concepts. well the end of matter at least. This excludes the Fermi-Dirac stuff and i think thats where im going wrong. I assumed that all particles would decay eventually and its seems thats not the case. So i was wrong, there will be no end to relative time. I think

I'm not a plant my friend and plants at least have some form of day/ night cycle. The two extremes of the balance i speak of are met, the intermediary stages are irrelevant. Obviously order itself has to be balanced with chaos and nature is a perfect example. The universe cant be all just chaos though things seem pretty well ordered to me, gravity for example, fractals, the uniform way the universe was spread after the big bang.

Originally posted by NOTGATE
I'm not a plant my friend and plants at least have some form of day/ night cycle. The two extremes of the balance i speak of are met, the intermediary stages are irrelevant. Obviously order itself has to be balanced with chaos and nature is a perfect example. The universe cant be all just chaos though things seem pretty well ordered to me, gravity for example, fractals, the uniform way the universe was spread after the big bang.

I was a plant once for two blistful years.

I was a porcupine plant, used in tea to relieve cramps.

Actually, that could have been my sister.

I'm starting to think the level of conversation is dropping in this thread.

Originally posted by NOTGATE
maybe you would care to elaborate on where im going wrong, since this is the wikipedia articles on these concepts. well the end of matter at least. This excludes the Fermi-Dirac stuff and i think thats where im going wrong. I assumed that all particles would decay eventually and its seems thats not the case. So i was wrong, there will be no end to relative time. I think

Well, for starters, "decay" does not mean something disappears, but that something turns into something else. Protons are stable in the sense that their half-life has been established to be many orders of magnitude larger than the age of the universe (of course, it cannot be experimentally established that something will never decay unless you wait infinitely long, which experimentalists cannot do).

Originally posted by vivify
Not necessarily; plants aren't "concious", yet they aren't unconcious either.

...and you know plants are not concious, how? Because you speak to them and they choose not to answer you, so you assume they are not concious, or lack the ability?

Originally posted by Thequ1ck
I was a plant once for two blistful years.

I was a porcupine plant, used in tea to relieve cramps.

Actually, that could have been my sister.

I spent a year as a fig leaf once.