OT: What is the Universe Expanding into?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

the universe is a mass psychosis? feel free to repeat that experiment - and disbeleive the brick wall all you want.

[Kamog]

Well, I suppose the universe could be all an illusion, but I couldn't think of any reason why people might believe that. What is the rationale for thinking that everything is an illusion?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

*deleted because of sarcasm*

[Fyron]

Originally posted by Kamog:
Well, I suppose the universe could be all an illusion, but I couldn't think of any reason why people might believe that. What is the rationale for thinking that everything is an illusion?

The point is that you would not really be able to tell if it was an illusion, so either viewpoint becomes just as arbitrary. Philosophical debate ensues. Much fun.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

much comments from the peanut gallery.

*munch, munch*

[Kamog]

So, if everything is an illusion, there is no experiment that you could do to prove it one way or another, because all the results of your experiments would also be an illusion.

As for the universe being a single thought with many Subscribers... it's also possible that there is only ONE Subscriber. I mean, you don't know if anybody else besides you is real. I know that my own thoughts exist but maybe I'm dreaming everything and everybody around me. Sure hope that's not the case - that would be a rather lonely situation to be in.

[Loser]

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
. . . and disbeleive the brick wall all you want.

I've actually done this with some success.

A girl, soon to be girlfriend, totaled her car about five hours from town. She had hit a deer, and very nearly reduced it to its constituent elements. Silly little sportscar didn't take it much better, but the girl was okay, mostly.

Anyway, I had already been up about eighteen hours at this point, because it was the weekend and I was staying up for poker.

On the way back, somewhere around twenty-six to twenty-eight hours of sleep deprivation, I started seeing things. This is fairly normal for me, I tend to start hallucinating fairly early in sleep-dep.

For the most part these illusions are pretty easy to ignore. They don't, as a rule, interact with reality, and only exist at the borders between area illuminated by my headlights (or occasionally the lights inside the car) and the darkness beyond.

I did, however, encounter one invigorating exception. The speed limit out here is seventy-five on most interstates, so while driving down the freeway at something close to 85 miles-per-hour I saw a brick house, right across the road, in front of me, at that distance where I could just barely distinguish between light and darkness.

So now I've got a choice, and it was one in which the conscious mind could not play to much of a role, both because it came so quickly and because the conscious mind wasn't exactly in prime decision-making condition. I kept driving.

My reasoning (or post-decision rationalization, it's hard to tell) was that if I stopped for the house and there was no house there, I would have done something awfully foolish, but if I kept driving and hit the house no one could really blame me.

After all, when you leave a house in the middle of Interstate 25 you should expect it to be run through with late-night travelers.

[ February 12, 2004, 11:36: Message edited by: Loser ]