Understanding the Theist Mindset.

This is perhaps already obvious to many of you, but I had a bit of a 'release' revelation a few days ago; I'm much less daunted by theist discussion thanks to it. Sorry if this sounds pompous, but I'd like to share.

'Pigeon Chess' is the best analogy I've heard so far to describe an atheist/theist discussion, but I kept wondering about ~how~ a theist manages to deny/dismiss fact/evidence even when it's right in front of them.

If you think to our education, we spend the first part of our lives building our minds by mimicking a few trusted 'authority figures' who are supposed to show us what's good and dangerous in the world (and being doubtful/in fear of anyone/anything else), but eventually we gain enough experience to start making conclusions of our own from what we experience around us.

Religious people are just people who have never left the first stage. Just as children, they focus on their 'authority figures' for (emotional) reward and punishment; they just 'blank' any information from any other source as 'wrong' or 'bad'.

I can almost compare a 'follower' education to training a lab rat: the reward is food if he does the 'good thing', and punishment is an electric shock if he does the 'bad'. Eventually the rat will grow to fear certain things and appreciate others, even without an actual reward being given. When released into the world, he will regard with incomprehension (and perhaps fear) anything different from the environment he was trained in, and run to his 'education environment' for safety if he can. Trained rats together will behave the same way, but as a pack.

The key here is emotion: the 'reward' for a theist comes directly from a leader approving a followed behavioural pattern, whereas the 'reward' for a thinker comes (first) from ~himself~ when he achieves understanding and uses it to a successful result/conclusion.

So, for a theist, any information not from certain sources or outside their programmed behavioural pattern ~doesn't even register~ if they are not approved by their leader/fellow followers, much in the same way 'god' doesn't register for atheists.

For religious leaders, all that matters is that their followers continue to focus on them for education, reward and punishment; one could even argue that the content of the doctrine used to establish/maintain this dependancy system... isn't even important.

Everything is light and time - what about the 'other side' ?

If my earlier idea was true, that would mean that every 'up' quark would exist as a 'down' quark in the spacetime-construct direction opposite to ours (or 'opposite dimension'). This really bothered me, as it would mean that, in the dimension opposite to ours, our world would be perfectly mirrored in antimatter.

Until I considered that the 'zero point' between the two dimensions. It's a 'zero point', right? It may be possible that anything originating from that in our dimension could be a complete somwhere else in the other :

I also doubt that the 'zero points' axes are 'aligned' between them... imagine a cloud of striped billiard balls rotating in all directions with no synchronisation at all. All that matters is that the dimension 'sides' are directly opposed to each other.

Antimatter exists and has been produced, and it has been demonstrated that antimatter annihilates matter... but if the above were true, a fermion annihilated in our dimension would also be annihilated in the other. Once the time-space rip maintaining energy is gone, the opposing time-construct will annihilate each other as well. 

The above idea is two dimensions that will 'zero out' in all its aspects if all its matter/energy is destroyed, meaning a return to a 'perfect state' nothing, but it is... disturbing, to say the least.

Religion vs. Rationality - a simple exercise to demonstrate why we can't communicate.

Theist/rationalist debates have always been a source of frustration.  The reason for this: our value systems are completely different, and the 'horizons' we use to orient ourselves are not even comparable. Consider the following two diagrams:

...now try to take one item from one diagram and place it in another. It's a difficult task... more than likely a theist would group all the 'science items' at the same level, whereas a rationalist would group all of the 'faith-dependant' items at the same level on his graph.

Perhaps my bias shows in the choice of items on each chart, but all I wanted to do is show the 'horizon' of our respective value systems. It would be an interesting exercise to take all items from both charts and place them in a box, then ask an interviewee to place them all on one chart, then another. I'm sure that a theist will place things like 'bible veracity' on 'demonstrable' even if it isn't - but that would only highlight more our value differences, wouldn't it?

Everything is light... and time?

Around one in the morning last night I watched around ten minutes of a (rather stupid) time-travel movie, and went to bed with that in my head... spending around an hour mulling 'brain-only' things usually helps my sleep. Anyway, I was thinking about the conditions that would have to be met for time travel to be possible... either somehow being able to re-create the entire universe at the desired point in time (not), somehow 'reversing' the action-reaction of particles (not) that in any case would 'travel' no faster in the opposite direction than our present sense of time (not not) and that again for the entire universe (not ∞ )... so then thought about manipulating a limited area of space-time.

If I was to 'reverse' a certain number of particles (I had tossed the 'speed' factor for the time being), I would have to not only reverse the particles themselves, but reverse the very essence of each particle, meaning down to quarks themselves. But this would make them... antimatter. Isolating that... more plausible, but again 'not'.

But then I got to thinking about 'particle reversal' and particle-antiparticle annihilation, and asked myself... do antiparticles travel backwards in time? The draw between a particle and an antiparticle is enormous, so much so that it is near impossible for us (today) to isolate an antiparticle from any particle (I digress), but anyways, in a collision between the two, imagine that their impact point is also a 'zero point' between two different 'directions' of energy AND time . This 'zero point', or 'perfect state' as I called it in an entry here three years ago (but in another context), could be what all matter in the universe is trying to attain.

I discarded my 'light bending' (into quarks) idea months ago, but I retained the persuasion that something happened to EMV energy above gamma level... what if it tore a hole in that 'zero state' (meaning penetrated slightly into the 'opposite of our' side) and became locked into running rings around its lip?

What if things happened the other way around? That is to say, with super-gamma-level energies being the ~source~ closest to the 'zero point' and all EMW's below were a residue, projectiles and smoke if you will, left over from the explosion that contained energies great enough to be 'rip maintainers' (mass-creators)? EMW's were probably (at their origin) energies emanating from that 'zero point' into 'our side'.

Anyhow, getting back to the 'energy/spacetime rip' struggle, it would probably take an enormous amount of energy to 'dislodge' that energy from its struggle between our two... dimensions (but why only two dimensions (why not dimensions between every direction possible?), and must the struggle be diametrically opposed?).

To continue this line of thought, if any EMW energy greater than gamma levels is enough to create a rip in spacetime, this would mean that every point in our spacetime can be a 'potential rip'. Is this dark energy/matter?


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Now let's play with this spacetime-rip idea a bit. If we imagine that an initial explosion in all directions in space and time managed to create rips in all directions... for simplicity's sake, let's just take two diametrically-opposed dimensions.

An explosion towards our 'construct direction' in spacetime (called 'dimension' hereon for simplicity's sake) would create a rip-ring (again, 'quark' for simplicity) whose energy field is more towards our dimension, and an explosion in the opposite would create the opposite (and in fact, the exact opposite could be true (an explosion into our dimension leaving the majority of its energy on the 'other side'), but the result would be the same). A 'positive' quark would be a rip whose energy amplitude extends in its majority into our dimension (let's say by 2/3 for simplicity) and a negative quark, the opposite.

These rips, without any 'energy controller' maintaining them open, would just close. A rip-energy combination, or quark, would remain stable as long as it wasn't approached by another, but when two positively-charged quarks approach each other, their respective 'rip' cores would be drawn to each other (much like two whirlpools), but probably not at a very high rate/strength (could this be the 'weak force'?), and they would be kept apart by their similar energy amplitudes extending into our/our opposite dimension (their charges would not 'draw across' or 'zero out' across the spacetime rip). Yet should two oppositely-charged quarks approach each other, their charges ~would~ zero out across the spacetime rip, and they would annihilate each other. The process of this happening is probably much like the effect as two magnets approaching each other; the closer they are, the stronger their pull towards each other, and this probably exponentially.

If it were this simple, the universe would appear and annihilate itself in an immeasurable length of time. Perhaps most of it did. But Hadrons are composed of ~three~ quarks, two of one kind and one of the opposite: two positive ('up') quarks eternally trying to annihilate a negative ('down') quark make a Proton, and two negative ('down') quarks and one positive ('up') quark make a Neutron. Did I even have to outline this?

Okay, to represent an 'up' quark, let's draw a symbolic horizontal EMW wave, and a horizontal line across it leaving 1/3 its amplitude below, 2/3 above. The line is the 'zero point', and everything above 'our dimension'.

There are two things to notice here: although most of the wave amplitude (energy) is in our universe, the 'draw' from the other side is lesser. If we look at the present Standard Model of Elementary particles, we see that 'up' quarks have more charge and less mass. If we move the line up 1/3 to represent a 'down' quark, we see less of the wave in our dimension but more on the 'other side'; the same table will show you that 'down' quarks have less charge but have more mass.

My earlier 'the oscillation of a looping EMW = gravity' idea makes more sense when it is placed as a ring around/inside/outside a spacetime rip, because part of that lateral action is taking place in a spacetime direction opposite to ours.

So, in summary, the idea I describe above is an 'extreme-frequency-between-spacetimes-oscillating ring of energy', an elementary particle that has charge, mass, gravity and the weak force.