Life is a braid in spacetime
nautil.us
Life is a braid in spacetime
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: Life is a braid in spacetime
#2Simply beautiful thoughts.
I love the idea that the atoms of our bodies are replaced over the years - that no part of me today was a part of me in my twenties - and this concept, the braid in spacetime, puts it more eloquently and more bravely than I could think.
It's great to be able to take words written by some guy on another part of the world and have them rearrange my brain and my thoughts - this is beautiful.
Re: Life is a braid in spacetime
#3Simply beautiful thoughts. I love the idea that the atoms of our bodies are replaced over the years - that no part of me today was a part of me in my twenties - and this concept, the braid in spacetime, puts it more eloquently and more bravely than I could think. It's great to be able to take words written by some guy on another part of the world and have them rearrange my brain and my thoughts - this is beautiful.
I like the naiveté of this comment, it reminds me what HN used to be, a place for wonder and discovery. Thanks for your comment.
Re: Life is a braid in spacetime
#4Simply beautiful thoughts. I love the idea that the atoms of our bodies are replaced over the years - that no part of me today was a part of me in my twenties - and this concept, the braid in spacetime, puts it more eloquently and more bravely than I could think. It's great to be able to take words written by some guy on another part of the world and have them rearrange my brain and my thoughts - this is beautiful.
Thinking of lifelines in space-time got me through some dark times years ago.
Have a look at Primo Levi's The Periodic Table - the book is a collection of biographical essays each themed with a chemical element. The last essay, Carbon, tells the story of a single carbon atom over the years. Another perspective.
Re: Life is a braid in spacetime
#5Simply beautiful thoughts. I love the idea that the atoms of our bodies are replaced over the years - that no part of me today was a part of me in my twenties - and this concept, the braid in spacetime, puts it more eloquently and more bravely than I could think. It's great to be able to take words written by some guy on another part of the world and have them rearrange my brain and my thoughts - this is beautiful.
Actually there are parts of you that were parts of you in your twenties. Some of the brain cells, some of your heart cells, and if you are a woman, your eggs.
Unless you are talking about how matter pops in and out of a apparent reality, in which case we're going too far down for me.
Re: Life is a braid in spacetime
#6Simply beautiful thoughts. I love the idea that the atoms of our bodies are replaced over the years - that no part of me today was a part of me in my twenties - and this concept, the braid in spacetime, puts it more eloquently and more bravely than I could think. It's great to be able to take words written by some guy on another part of the world and have them rearrange my brain and my thoughts - this is beautiful.
Actually there are parts of you that were parts of you in your twenties. Some of the brain cells, some of your heart cells, and if you are a woman, your eggs. Unless you are talking about how matter pops in and out of a apparent reality, in which case we're going too far down for me.
If you are left only with some of your brain cells and some of your heart cells and if your are a woman your egs, are you still an aware human being?
You and other people are missing the point of the perspective and on top of that you are even admitting that even what you claim is constant isn't really when it comes down to it (matter popping in an out).
The insight is of course that things are always in flux and that they are much less "solid" than they might look.
You are obviously free to dismiss this as interesting but I find it hard to swallow this kind of "the hole in the cheese" comments. It's everything thats wrong with critical thinking.
Re: Life is a braid in spacetime
#7He does make the rather blithe assumption that mathematics is somehow real, and not an idiopathic artefact of our cognition, as much as the apparently respectively static and dynamic nature of space and time that he notes most posess. Perhaps mathematics is also a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Me, I see the universe as information, and everything else flows from that. We are needles scratching out the tune from a hyperdimensional record. Our mathematical laws may well be encoded within that information, or are representative of symmetry within it, which is also reflected on the structures and strictures of our minds, but I see mathematics as effect rather than cause - not that there's really such a thing as causality, either, if you stop thinking of "the arrow of time" as being a thing other than how we experience spacetime. Causality is as human an invention as sunrise.
Then again, I'm assuming that information can exist.
Perhaps it's turtles^W simulations all the way down.
Re: Life is a braid in spacetime
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually there are parts of you that were parts of you in your twenties. Some of the brain cells, some of your heart cells, and if you are a woman, your eggs. Unless you are talking about how matter pops in and out of a apparent reality, in which case we're going too far down for me.
If you are left only with some of your brain cells and some of your heart cells and if your are a woman your egs, are you still an aware human being? You and other people are missing the point of the perspective and on top of that you are even admitting that even what you claim is constant isn't really when it comes down to it (matter popping in an out). The insight is of course that things are always in flux and tha…
You wrote an interesting comment, shure around the cheese-holes there is "taste" but let me ask:
Do You Braid For Me ? Do You Braid For Yourself Too ;)
Meanwhile: http://i.imgur.com/m1x2MtU.png
Re: Life is a braid in spacetime
#9He does make the rather blithe assumption that mathematics is somehow real, and not an idiopathic artefact of our cognition, as much as the apparently respectively static and dynamic nature of space and time that he notes most posess. Perhaps mathematics is also a stubbornly persistent illusion. Me, I see the universe as information, and everything else flows from that. We are needles scratching out the tune from a h…
When you say "information" what do you mean exactly? I can see information as a set of constraints that arises in the system due to how it evolves, and that those constraints enable structure to emerge, and that with the law of conservation of energy no energy can be created or destroyed, it means that all those structures can only do what they can do, any deviation from the constraints will require new energy or removing energy from the system to alter the course.
I like your needles - hyperdimensional record analogy. I would say mathematics encodes for and predicts a certain set of constraints, but we can never be sure we have observed or found the most fundamental constraint, and so to us, an incomplete mathematical 'law' will look like it needs energy added or removed to fit with the real world, but in reality it's just a constraint somewhere that we haven't seen that will readjust the series. All of this is kind of written on a whim, I'm not sure I thought it through enough :
Re: Life is a braid in spacetime
#10Simply beautiful thoughts. I love the idea that the atoms of our bodies are replaced over the years - that no part of me today was a part of me in my twenties - and this concept, the braid in spacetime, puts it more eloquently and more bravely than I could think. It's great to be able to take words written by some guy on another part of the world and have them rearrange my brain and my thoughts - this is beautiful.
Actually there are parts of you that were parts of you in your twenties. Some of the brain cells, some of your heart cells, and if you are a woman, your eggs. Unless you are talking about how matter pops in and out of a apparent reality, in which case we're going too far down for me.
The cells persist, but the atoms that make up those cells are still replaced over time.