2012 - What does it mean to you?

[Sachita]

Originally Posted by NJFemmie

From as astrological standpoint - the Pluto-Jupiter-Saturn quincunx on that date does signify an intense spiritual change/enlightenment of sort - also indicating a 'painful' transformation for some (thanks to Saturn and Jupiter). In a nutshell, it does signifies a new beginning - both on a personal level and a collective level. (These planets are more "generational" than they are "individual" and the effects vary upon the placement of these planets in a person's chart.)

Yeah, I know .. blah blah blah. It means something is going to happen, but I really don't believe it will be the end of the physical world. It might feel that way to some - (but that will be more on an emotional level).

Change is good, even if it feels bad at first.

Otherwise, I'll be 46 in 2012, Mare will be 49. Hopefully by then, we'll have our farm and a pot belly pig named Harold. Oh and a chicken, and maybe a horse or two. (and no, not of the apocalyptic breed).

I totally agree with you. How exactly it will manifest is yet to be seen. I will always be prepared for things but my most important preparation is my spiritual consciousness. I have been increase my vibration and doing what I need to do to prepare for the future, whatever that means.

Although I am not an expert I am certain it's all about
Quantum Physics
http://library.thinkquest.org/3487/qp.html

What reality will you manifest?

I will be with my soulmate, we will be happy each moment we breathe. It will be our commitment to feed each other and keep each other safe.

Things are aligning and change is inevitable. The planet has always shifted and change. This will be great change. Will it happen all one one day? No, I dont think so but i do believe there will be a great sign. Its already happening all around us.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKyNIY9oMnw"]YouTube- Lisa Thiel - Song to Inanna[/ame]

[DELSDAUGHTER]

nothing...over my life time..they have said the world was gonna end a couple of times....i will believe when i see it........and by that time i wont have time to care anyway

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Sachita

Although I am not an expert I am certain it's all about
Quantum Physics
http://library.thinkquest.org/3487/qp.html

I don't see how it could have anything to do with quantum physics. The reasons for this will require a bit of explanation.

QM (quantum physics) is a theory dealing only with microscopic objects. By this I mean that it really only deals with *sub-atomic* objects. The reason for this is that the sub-atomic world deals with objects on what is called the Planck length. The Planck length is the smallest conceivable distance. It is 10^-43 (that's a 1 with 43 zeros in front of it). Atoms are HUGE compared to the Planck length. Once you start talking about molecules and other macro-objects (and for our purposes here even a single bacterial spore is a macro-object) all of the various statistical effects cancel one another out and we can safely treat that object as a classical phenomena (meaning we don't need to use quantum physics). (This is not ALWAYS the case, computer circuitry is becoming so small that engineers have to take into account quantum mechanical effects but they are building logic gates that are only, maybe, a dozen or so atoms across. To give you a sense of scale the average human hair is between 800,000 and 1,200,000 atoms across.)

Quantum mechanics is necessary when talking about things like the nucleus of an atom or the electron shells around that nucleus but that is really about all. The only OTHER exception I can think of is when you are dealing with the interior of a black hole (which, no matter the size of the black hole's event horizon can be treated as a singularity at or a little larger than the Planck length). However, it's important to note that this ONLY applies to the *interior* of a black hole, once you are beyond the event horizon black holes can be treated as relativistic objects because they are so massive and you can ignore any quantum mechanical effects.

Fritjof Capra and Fred Alan Wolf (Dr. Quantum) not-with-standing people in the mainstream of physics do not ascribe quantum mechanical effects to macro-objects.

Another important thing to remember about quantum mechanics is that it is a *statistical* theory. While it is still deterministic what is usually talked about is the probability that, for instance, a given electron will be found in a given orbit (shell) of an atom.

Quantum mechanics is a vital part of what is called the Standard Model of particle physics but the key words here are *particle* physics. QM enables physicists to describe the four fundamental forces (electromagnetic, gravitational, strong and weak nuclear)*, what they are made of (quarks and bozons) and why they have the strengths they do. However, once you are talking about objects *effected* by those forces typically quantum mechanics is not particularly useful.

Anything the size of the Earth and certainly any living things ON the Earth are too large and too hot (from a thermodynamic perspective) for quantum mechanics to apply to them. Even a single neuron in your brain is too large and too hot for quantum mechanics to be usefully applied to it.

I'm not saying that it is absolutely *impossible* just very, very, very, very, very, very improbable!

*The four forces in order of strength are:

1. Strong nuclear force: Responsible for holding atoms together. Messenger particle is the gluon.
2. Weak nuclear force: Responsible for atomic decay. Messenger particle the W and Z gauge bozons.
3. Electromagnetic force: Responsible for light, electricity and magnetism. Messenger particle is the photon.**
4. Gravity: Warping of space-time by the presence of mass. Messenger particle is the graviton.

** To appreciate the difference in strength values between the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force (the two forces we're most familiar with) try this. During a thunderstorm take a comb and rub it on your shirt (best if it is wool) then hold that comb over a piece of unimpeded paper sitting on your desk. It should lift the paper. Think about this. It takes the mass of the entire PLANET to hold the paper on the desk and only the small amount of static electricity you can generate during a thunderstorm with a comb to overcome the planet's gravity!

Here is a link to a paper I wrote on the misuse of quantum mechanics for a philosophy of science class last term. While I wrote it with my professor (who was a chemist in another career incarnation) as a target audience it should still be accessible to most people (I hope):

http://web.me.com/dreadgeek/Dreaded_...mysticism.html

[Cyclopea]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

Here is a link to a paper I wrote on the misuse of quantum mechanics for a philosophy of science class last term. While I wrote it with my professor (who was a chemist in another career incarnation) as a target audience it should still be accessible to most people (I hope):

http://web.me.com/dreadgeek/Dreaded_...mysticism.html

That is a fantastic paper and I wish it was short enough to have posted it here directly. You are very good at explaining complex theories to a layperson.
That paper deserves a thread of it's own.
Just say No to New Age Fascism!
"any meaning-creation systems we deploy should be in line with science or, if that is not possible, they should stay as far away from the purview of science as is humanly possible." Indeed.

[Glenn]

Last Nov. 3, www.bbc.co.uk aired a documentary on the subject of black holes. In the search of Black Holes they found something that is the building block of existence, and a subject that keeps the balance in the Universe. They said this discovery has frightened scientists as they can't make sense of it. They have found something which cannot be seen, it is so small yet it's mass equals infinity. It's where time stops and there is no Space. This is where physics fails. This is where the Universe came from and is at the centre of each black hole. It cannot be seen, but will give traces of light. There are millions of it, and I'm sure science will discover it is closer to home then they think. Science has given this place where infinite Gravity and Infinite Density exists the name "Singularity." This "Singularity" is something they cannot explain as the equations make this equal Infinity. Theory of Relativity is thrown out the window, and when they use Quatum Mechanics it gets even worse as this equals Infinity x Infinity. Astrologically, there will be an alignment, but we cannot say for certain what will occur.

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by popcorninthesofa

Last Nov. 3, www.bbc.co.uk aired a documentary on the subject of black holes. In the search of Black Holes they found something that is the building block of existence, and a subject that keeps the balance in the Universe. They said this discovery has frightened scientists as they can't make sense of it. They have found something which cannot be seen, it is so small yet it's mass equals infinity. It's where time stops and there is no Space. This is where physics fails. This is where the Universe came from and is at the centre of each black hole. It cannot be seen, but will give traces of light. There are millions of it, and I'm sure science will discover it is closer to home then they think. Science has given this place where infinite Gravity and Infinite Density exists the name "Singularity." This "Singularity" is something they cannot explain as the equations make this equal Infinity. Theory of Relativity is thrown out the window, and when they use Quatum Mechanics it gets even worse as this equals Infinity x Infinity. Astrologically, there will be an alignment, but we cannot say for certain what will occur.

Okay, a bit of clarification. A singularity is a mathematical construction to describe the center of a black hole. It doesn't terrify scientists it is interesting. The issue with the interior of a black hole is that you need two different, mutually exclusive models, to deal with it. Those two models are quantum mechanics (which deals with very small objects as discussed above) and general relativity. The problem with this is that the two theories do *not* agree and when you try to use them both, you get nonsensical answers (infinity). There are several prospects on the table to deal with this situation, string theory is one (although it may not pan out) and loop quantum gravity is another. Both are altogether too arcane and technical for me to delve into here.

The singularity as the beginning of the Universe is not used anymore. It is an artifact of cosmology that includes general relativity but not quantum mechanics. If you 'roll the tape backwards' to the beginning of the Universe without incorporating quantum mechanics you end up with an infinitely dense mass in an infinitely small space (a singularity). However, later developments in cosmology that *do* incorporate quantum mechanics eliminate the need for a singularity and no one in cosmology uses it any longer.

Singularities do *not* keep the balance of the Universe because the Universe is not in balance. Dark matter and dark energy (whatever they are) are *far* more important at explaining the expansion of the Universe (and thus its topology) than black holes or singularities.

Actually if there were a black hole in our immediate neighborhood, we would detect it. They are NOT subtle objects. Black holes have a number of very noticeable effects if they are in the neighborhood of other objects so it would NOT sneak up on us. Our sun lacks the mass to become a black hole by a couple of orders of magnitude. The nearest black hole to us is the SMBH at the center of the galaxy and that is 30,000 light years away (that's 17,634,641,716,300,000 miles away!).

There are millions of black holes, in fact all the spiral galaxies appear to have supermassive black holes at the center of them but they are ALL very far away from us.

To say that black holes terrify scientists because we don't fully understand the physics of them is an insult to scientists. It is that lack of understanding that creates interesting scientific work. The only reason it would terrify them if, for some reason, we found one in our immediate (solar) neighborhood but there isn't one and there isn't anything near (within a few hundred light years) massive enough to create one.


Cheers
Aj

[SuperFemme]

I think he is responsible for the singularity:

[SuperFemme]

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Cyclopea

That is a fantastic paper and I wish it was short enough to have posted it here directly. You are very good at explaining complex theories to a layperson.
That paper deserves a thread of it's own.
Just say No to New Age Fascism!
"any meaning-creation systems we deploy should be in line with science or, if that is not possible, they should stay as far away from the purview of science as is humanly possible." Indeed.

Thank you for the praise. I enjoyed writing it and my professor thought it was a lot of fun to read. I appreciate your saying that I was able to make it understandable because one of the books I would really like to write at some point is a full-bodied exploration of what a new meaning-creating system would look like that took, as a jumping-off point, the world as described by science.

One thing that has caused me to lose sleep over the last decade or so is that I have come to realize that our meaning-creating systems (read religion or spirituality) are largely out-of-date. Most of them describe a world that is actually very much contrary to the world as described by modern science. This is something that we can ill-afford any longer because there are some very big questions that are either barreling down on us or have already arrived and our meaning-creating systems do not appear to have the tools to deal with them.

I'll mention three to illustrate the kinds of problems I'm talking about:

1) Climate change. We *must* deal with this problem but it is not so simple or straight-forward as all of us getting rid of our cars and no longer using fossil fuels. Unless you have the stomach for a VERY large die-off (think half the human population) we can't just turn the clock back to the pre-agricultural era. The agricultural era (pre-Industrial revolution) can't sustain 6 billion+ people. What's more, those of us in the nations that have *already* passed to a post-industrial nation cannot ethically go to those nations that have yet to pass through the industrial phase and say "yes, granted, we chopped down our forests and paved over everything in sight but YOU can't do that because the planet can't afford it so, sorry, it's no better than subsistence agriculture for you and your descendants".

2) Advances in biology. Within our lifetimes some very interesting things are going to happen. One of which is that we are going to develop truly NEW lifeforms. By this I mean DNA patterns that have *never* existed, in any form, on this planet before. The first artificial cell has been created. A truly novel form of life is on the horizon. What's more, at this point, cloning is an engineering problem and not a scientific problem. (The difference here is this: the scientific problem is "can it be done" the engineering problem is "how do we do this efficiently, safely and economically".) When human clones exist what do we do then?

3) Sentient machines. While I think this one may be the most distant from where we sit now, at *some* point I think we're going to have to deal with a truly sentient machine. It may be a robot, it may be an AI but it will be self-aware. What rights should a self-aware artifact have? Should it own itself or can it be owned by its creator?

NONE of the religions or spiritual systems created so far appear to have any real means of dealing with these questions and they are *deep* questions. At least two of those I expect to see on our plates in my lifetime. The last one is most likely beyond the horizon of my life but will almost certainly be addressed by the time my granddaughter is an old woman. We currently don't have the tools to solve the problems. "We shouldn't play god" isn't an answer. "This or that ancient civilization was in harmony with nature" isn't an answer even if it were true (and it has never been true for any civilization). "We shouldn't build such things" isn't an answer. "The Bible forbids it" isn't an answer. All our cop-outs and short-cuts to actually truly entering into the question.

What's more most of our meaning-creating system misappropriate scientific *sounding* language to bolster their cases. The invocation of quantum mechanics is just the latest and most egregious example of this. Quantum theory doesn't say what New Agers say it does. At the same time, New Agers miss the elegance of beauty of what quantum mechanics *does* say because they are trying to make it into something it isn't. I love QM and wish I had the mathematics to read the literature on it in its native language but I don't (particle physicists take math classes that are, essentially, tuned for their field and while there is cross-over it is a different kind of mathematics than what I, as a biologist, will ever use). What I do know of QM, leaves me in awe with my head spinning because the sub-atomic world is so wonderfully wacky and weird. I wish that people who use QM as a way to give their spiritual beliefs the imprimatur of science would just sit with the subject matter, meet it on its *own* terms and try to wrap their heads around objects as small as an electron or try to imagine, really viscerally imagine, the problem of detecting the position and momentum of an electron at the same time. Once you've grasped that this is a problem that cannot be solved, ever, by anyone, under any circumstances, one gains an appreciation for just how majestic the universe is and just how puny our brains actually are.

One last thing before I close. I wish that more people truly internalized what several very eminent scientists have called the three blows to homo sapiens inflated sense of itself. Those three are this:

1) The heliocentric model. The insult here was that it took the Earth from being a special place in the Universe and made us realize that our planet is a perfectly ordinary nickel-iron rock, orbiting a completely undistinguished main-sequence star at the outer edge of a perfectly ordinary spiral galaxy.

2) Darwinian evolution by natural selection. The insult here is that it took us from being some special creation, above and beyond nature and told us that we are a large-brained African primate that is an absolute newcomer to this planet.

3) Neuroscience. The insult here is just getting warmed up. Already we are discovering that we ARE our brains. There are no thoughts you have that occur outside your brains. All your loves, all your joys are electrochemical reactions happening in your neural system. That doesn't mean that they are not *real* just that they are not *special*.

Cheers
Aj

[Cyclopea]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

Thank you for the praise. I enjoyed writing it and my professor thought it was a lot of fun to read. I appreciate your saying that I was able to make it understandable because one of the books I would really like to write at some point is a full-bodied exploration of what a new meaning-creating system would look like that took, as a jumping-off point, the world as described by science.
That sounds fascinating. I can't imagine a formal merging of the two that doesn't end up in a cultic kool-aid situation- lol!


One thing that has caused me to lose sleep over the last decade or so is that I have come to realize that our meaning-creating systems (read religion or spirituality) are largely out-of-date. Most of them describe a world that is actually very much contrary to the world as described by modern science. This is something that we can ill-afford any longer because there are some very big questions that are either barreling down on us or have already arrived and our meaning-creating systems do not appear to have the tools to deal with them.

I'm not sure that religions have truly been "meaning systems" for some time now. I think they function as an ideological and cultural glue tying together human superorganisms which vie with each other for resources. Like a bacterial meme substrate. Ecstatic experiences result from abandoning the independent self into the comfort of the larger (super)organism.
I don't really see any religions embracing modernity itself, much less scientific and technological advances. Most religions seem to be concerned with creating a child-like infantilized worldview where some "great parent" cares for the believer and cradles them safely in a place of stasis.
I don't really see any religion embracing any technology or forward looking view but rather nostalgia for an era that believers feel existed when they were children, or an imagined nostalgia for an era that they feel must have existed in times past. In fact, "The Past Into The Future" might be an adequate slogan for the relationship religion has with science. Or maybe "The Past As We Fantasize It". In that context it will be ethicists, not religious folks, that "wrestle" with the future. Religion will just say "Future Bad."

I'll mention three to illustrate the kinds of problems I'm talking about:

1) Climate change. We *must* deal with this problem but it is not so simple or straight-forward as all of us getting rid of our cars and no longer using fossil fuels. Unless you have the stomach for a VERY large die-off (think half the human population) we can't just turn the clock back to the pre-agricultural era. The agricultural era (pre-Industrial revolution) can't sustain 6 billion+ people. What's more, those of us in the nations that have *already* passed to a post-industrial nation cannot ethically go to those nations that have yet to pass through the industrial phase and say "yes, granted, we chopped down our forests and paved over everything in sight but YOU can't do that because the planet can't afford it so, sorry, it's no better than subsistence agriculture for you and your descendants".

Well that would be nice. But a biological colony's prerogative is expansion in size and the allocating of increased resources for same. Therefore, only when decreased carbon emissions (etc.) increase "profit" will such changes be adopted. To do otherwise would require that a massive biological meta-organism be formed among all existing colonies, one that suddenly stopped expansion and practiced containment in response to a theoretical future threat. Both parts of that equation- that all countries/peoples/cultures would join together in agreement, and that such a uniform coalition would voluntarily cease seeking wealth, seem highly unlikely.

2) Advances in biology. Within our lifetimes some very interesting things are going to happen. One of which is that we are going to develop truly NEW lifeforms. By this I mean DNA patterns that have *never* existed, in any form, on this planet before. The first artificial cell has been created. A truly novel form of life is on the horizon. What's more, at this point, cloning is an engineering problem and not a scientific problem. (The difference here is this: the scientific problem is "can it be done" the engineering problem is "how do we do this efficiently, safely and economically".) When human clones exist what do we do then?

I agree, the age of "artificial" life is upon us. Novel lifeforms, cloning, transhumanism, total body transplants, etc. The ethicists will have their day, and taboos will be both created and discarded, and I believe it will all be quite shocking and distasteful to the backward-looking folks but human creativity is unstoppable and it will all eventually become quite rote and all of us alive now will have our DNA preserved as "heritage" DNA for our ancestors to play with. New social conventions will be adopted that are easily integrated into "meaning creation systems" as they truly exist (media/educational/cultural agreements), but not for religions which will continue to look backwards to an imaginary time.

3) Sentient machines. While I think this one may be the most distant from where we sit now, at *some* point I think we're going to have to deal with a truly sentient machine. It may be a robot, it may be an AI but it will be self-aware. What rights should a self-aware artifact have? Should it own itself or can it be owned by its creator?

It will be interesting to see how that plays out...

NONE of the religions or spiritual systems created so far appear to have any real means of dealing with these questions and they are *deep* questions. At least two of those I expect to see on our plates in my lifetime. The last one is most likely beyond the horizon of my life [You never know! ] but will almost certainly be addressed by the time my granddaughter is an old woman. We currently don't have the tools to solve the problems. "We shouldn't play god" isn't an answer. "This or that ancient civilization was in harmony with nature" isn't an answer even if it were true (and it has never been true for any civilization). "We shouldn't build such things" isn't an answer. "The Bible forbids it" isn't an answer. All our cop-outs and short-cuts to actually truly entering into the question.

What's more most of our meaning-creating system misappropriate scientific *sounding* language to bolster their cases. The invocation of quantum mechanics is just the latest and most egregious example of this. Quantum theory doesn't say what New Agers say it does. At the same time, New Agers miss the elegance of beauty of what quantum mechanics *does* say because they are trying to make it into something it isn't.[I had to bold that part!] I love QM and wish I had the mathematics to read the literature on it in its native language but I don't (particle physicists take math classes that are, essentially, tuned for their field and while there is cross-over it is a different kind of mathematics than what I, as a biologist, will ever use). What I do know of QM, leaves me in awe with my head spinning because the sub-atomic world is so wonderfully wacky and weird. I wish that people who use QM as a way to give their spiritual beliefs the imprimatur of science would just sit with the subject matter, meet it on its *own* terms and try to wrap their heads around objects as small as an electron or try to imagine, really viscerally imagine, the problem of detecting the position and momentum of an electron at the same time. Once you've grasped that this is a problem that cannot be solved, ever, by anyone, under any circumstances, one gains an appreciation for just how majestic the universe is and just how puny our brains actually are.

One last thing before I close. I wish that more people truly internalized what several very eminent scientists have called the three blows to homo sapiens inflated sense of itself. Those three are this:

1) The heliocentric model. The insult here was that it took the Earth from being a special place in the Universe and made us realize that our planet is a perfectly ordinary nickel-iron rock, orbiting a completely undistinguished main-sequence star at the outer edge of a perfectly ordinary spiral galaxy.

Good point.

2) Darwinian evolution by natural selection. The insult here is that it took us from being some special creation, above and beyond nature and told us that we are a large-brained African primate that is an absolute newcomer to this planet.

I agree, and also think there is quite a bit more to understand about Group Selection and it's relationship to evolution, and what that "blow" will mean to our sense of culture and civilization (including religion).

3) Neuroscience. The insult here is just getting warmed up. Already we are discovering that we ARE our brains. There are no thoughts you have that occur outside your brains. All your loves, all your joys are electrochemical reactions happening in your neural system. That doesn't mean that they are not *real* just that they are not *special*.

I'm not sure how this will play out. Perhaps this is what will erode the sense of "self" and ultimately allow the formation of a larger colony?


Cheers
Aj

------------------------
What fun!
I told you you should have started another thread on it!