I need a simple run down on electricity. How is it that everything concerning humans and the afterlife seems to find its basics in mathematics and electricity?  :-? Nanner

You know Nanner I'm an engineer (albeit not an electrical one), but I'd have a heck of a time explaining 'what electricity is' in the sort of holistic terms that would make sense in this forum.

Science and engineering treats it by quantitative mathemathical means, and has evolved calculations to predict how it will behave in certain key situations - like generation from physical energy, flowing in a wire, being controlled by devices like switches, capacitors and so on and converted back into physical energy/doing work in motors and the like. There's also sciences of 'static electricity' and electromagnetic fields.

The finite nature of these situations and their amenability to being treated by quantitative means suggests that we 'know all about electricity'. But maths is not reality - it's just a mind made system of logic that in 'set piece' cases enables us to model some situations and hence predict outcomes using our minds. ( ;) maybe with the help of a PC too!!)

So the reality couldn't be further from the truth. We've lots of conceptual 'stuff' figured out to describe how electricity behaves, and even 'what it is' (...a flow of charges, whatever that is) but except in the most crude terms we don't seem to have much of a clue as to what  it truly is.

All it takes too is a few moments thought about the nature of the energies that flow and are modulated in spiritual work (like kundalini, those that influence states of mind and the whole business of alternative realities) to realise that there have to be a whole range of very real energies out there not recognised by science.

Physicists like Dave may have a better idea, but we somehow seem to end up down in the depths of particle physics before we know what's happened.

Maybe this isn't that much different to everything else in our world too. It's common to talk of the ineffable nature of qualities like love and creativity that come from the absolute, but in truth the same seems to apply to pretty much everything.

What truly is a block of wood beyond the highly limited and heavily biased channels of our perception????

I'm rather hoping that humanity remains mired in it's limited view of the nature of energy, because while oil and nuclear power for example are doing a lot of damage to the planet I can't imagine what harm we'd do at our current state of spiritual evolution if we got a handle on the energetic underpinnings of reality.

Not much help I'm sure...

Hi,

Nanna  

8-)
Nanna,

I am also an engineer A famous physicist once asked his learners  'What is electricity?" One bright guy stood up and then immediately sat down again. The scientist asked the student why he had sat down so suddenly, to which he replied "I knew what electricity was, but on standing forgot".

The physicist replied in frustration, up untill now only God knew what electricity really was and would not tell us, and now you have gone and forgot.  

We know what electricity does but not relly what it is is.

alan

Alan McDougall wrote on Feb 1^st, 2008 at 7:05am:

Hi, Nanna

Hi Alan

There's an excellent book by Purcell, part of the U C Berkeley physics series, that gives a good background in electricity.http://www.electricityforum.com/electricity-and-magnetism.html  has the very basic ideas.

Advanced ideas like WHY there is magnetism refers to moving charges plus Lorentz contraction. Purcell did a wonderful job on this. Extremely crudely put, charge is a basic property of matter. As charges move, usually about 3 mm per second for copper wire, they undergo relativistic contraction so that they seem to be concentrated. If you move along with the positive charge then the negatives rush past at twice the normal speed and everything looks negative and they attract the positives more strongly. And vice versa for riding along with the negatives, as the positives seem to contract. These relativistic changes with the motion of charge ultimately gives rise to fields of charge in space that we recognize as magnetism. (That's a lot of hand waving - sorry - if that satisfies you, fine, otherwise read on)

physics.weber.edu/schroeder/mrr/MRRhandout.pdf This is how Purcell explains all of electromagnetism in terms of nothing more than Lorentz and Coulomb forces. What we experience ultimately is electric charge pushing on electric charge.

Now we get to the META-physics and ask how charge occurs. (I have an answer on that one too, but it is highly speculative and doesn't fit here. -  No space, can't write in symbols, can't draw pictures.) Science has no answer. But wait a while and someone will pop up with one. :-)

dave

Not to pull the discussion down an off topic techie rabbit hole Dave, but is a charge an actual discrete entity? Or is the reality as is usually the case is a continuum or a flow - that's broken up into 'lumps' for the purposes of mathematical modelling?

Varga,



Quote:

Not to pull the discussion down an off topic techie rabbit hole Dave, but is a charge an actual discrete entity? Or is the reality as is usually the case is a continuum or a flow - that's broken up into 'lumps' for the purposes of mathematical modelling?

BOTH ILLOGICALLY

alan

Hi Vajra-
This wasn't intended to become a book length remak, but ... :-/

I neglected to add that since Nanner wondered why logic and math and electriocity etc all are important, the reason is that everything that is not-logical is chaotic, or otherwise contains its own contradiction - like jumping upwards from a massive body contains the contradiction which pulls us back down again. Math is the easiest and most compact expression.

In the astral regions we can create worlds that have no such limitations, but they vanish when we stop creating them because they are innately self-contradictry. As a demonstration of this, meditate to the level at which you hallucinate, and then attempt to "save" a hallucination by somehow tying it in a knot, or putting it in a box, or whatever. Because they are innately self-contradictory, the hallucination vanishes.

There are several very fundamental properties of reality that we rarely consider in their own right. The first property that is important is extension. Extension is the ability to be localized in the physical world, to accept the additional of attributes, and to interact as an attributive locus (aka "thing"). Nominal existence requires extension, but nothing else. Attributive existence requires extension plus attributes. It is characteristic of extension that it is additive without replacement.

Mass is an attribute that consists of the level of extension, in the sense that the collection of attributes defines the manner of interaction, and the statistics of interactive products. Thus, we can consider gravitation to be the tendency to distribute attributes from a "massive" source to other "sinks" that gain in mass as they gain in attribution. It is characteristic of mass that it adds without replacement.

Electrical Charge is an attributive pair in which an initially polar dyadic system tends to fold into itself so as to neutralize the charge and annihilate the charge. The result is another fundamental attribute, energy. Other forms of charge occur, such as the triadic charge with quarks. Charge adds without replacement.  

Energy is the ability to cause attributive change. Taken over time or space we call this power, and recognize it as the rate of attributive changes. While energy, power and entropy (log of adds against state) add without replacement, the information content and meaning adds as a complexion (set of all subsets) with replacement.

There is no state that retains manifest static existence. At 0 Kelvins, matter ceases to be defined. Thus, extension, charge and mass are known only as dynamics. In the same way, sensation cannot occur in the absence of dynamic change (eg. the impact of a photon) so there is no static sensation of attribution. Thus, in the last analysis, everything is dynamic. Since everything is dynamic, and the nature of dynamism is expressed as changes of attribution, we can reduce reality to process plus relationships, and totally eliminate static structures. This implies that what we regard as static is actually in dynamic interaction at all times. Thus, there is a tendency for formation of aggregates, but also for their decomposition, so nothing lasts.

Now, going back to the beginning, the nature of charge is polar. We have a polar event at the "Beginning", which is the distinction between extension and vacuity, the two aspects of voidness. Extension in this case is like the Planck sized object that is so tiny it collapses into a micro-blackhole of zero interior dimension, but with an exterior to which we can point. Vacuity is like the infinite potentiality of the cosmos which is so empty that no matter what is stuffed into it, it can't be filled. It has an interior that we can point to, but no exterior. This gives a definition in which the two differ in additivity. Call the Planck sized point A. Then X + A = X.  Call the vacuous void W. Then W + X = W. And, because we are dealing with a dichotomy we can go forward and build an hierarchy of nominal relationships. We can also go back and observe that both aspects add to nothing, A + W = 0.

From that, let's consider what happens when we separate the Planck size entended point A and the vacuous cosmic voidness W. (I use theta-sub-alpha and theta-sub-omega that sum to theta-null if you look in my usual writings.) They arise as a pair such that they are mutuallyinterdefinitive. There is a tendency for the Planck sized term A to rejoin the vacuous term W. This tendency is statistical in nature, and expresses the probability of merger. We sense this probability as the "force" by which the two terms seek to merge.

Mutual repulsion is explicable as competition. When charge A is near other As, as opposed to elsewhere, then elsewhere looks more like the vacuous charge W, so we get repulsion as everything tries to go elsewhere. The same is true of charge W.

The carriers of charge depend upon the charge and the symmetry structure by which the charges are defined. Lgically, we expect that every meta-eigenstate (the eigenmatrices that arises as iterated complexions over basis two, the primal dyad) will conserve some kind of differential internal structure and thus will have some kind of differential charges and a dynamic.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0711.0770 This is Garrett Lisi's paper on Lie symmetry groups in the exceptional simple Lie group E8. This is more of the same thing, but quite well develped. (It's well past my level of playing with 7-spaces.) It will fill in the rest of the model.

I hope this is useful-
dave

A woman once came up to Thomas Edison at a social function and asked "what is electricity?" "Electricity is, Madam - use it wisely."  was his reply.


Matthew

HI,

In other words electricity is one form of that mysterious something energy , that cannot be created or destroyed just used to perform an action or create an reaction.

Come on Dave get a bottle full of the root stuff called energy and you will really really impress me.

Your explanation was comprehensive but I believe beyond the understanding on the forum members not familar to science and physics as you are.

alan

Nanner wrote on Jan 31^st, 2008 at 9:12pm:

I need a simple run down on electricity. How is it that everything concerning humans and the afterlife seems to find its basics in mathematics and electricity?  :-? Nanner

Nanner check a book called "Tuning the Diamonds" it will tell you all you may need to know about your question.Verbose???

Gotcha devayan - will check it out  ;) - Thank you kindly. ~Nanner~

Thank you Dave - it so quickly drops into science speak, a whole 'other' language. I'm not sure I have it right, but there seem to be a few interesting implications in the framework you set out.  :-? Please pardon my getting nerdy guys.

Charges you seem to be saying do seem apparently to exist as differentiated 'things'.

They have no absolute existence, what appears to exist is actually a localised differentiation of stuff (extension with attributes) dependent for its seeming existence on energy and only capable of being sensed as a result of energetic emissions too. (you know this, but that's form and emptiness again as taught in Buddhism isn't it?)

It begs some interesting questions too. Just what is the power that creates this (logically existing - not sure why? Is it because it exists so it's logical?) tendency to differentiation, why doesn't it just sink back into some primordial uniformity?

Why is it that even at the level of the very tiny differentiations called charges there's something that causes them to compete rather than to merge. It's almost like that even at that micro level that there's something that makes competition (some form of 'selfishness', or at least an expression of whatever it is that's the tendency to maintain differentiation) a fundamental property of differentiation.

Lots of implications there for the apparently independently existing but perhaps more plausibly the result of the coincidence of impermanent multiple factors SELF. Even to the point that when the dyad (self and other) 'folds in on itself' (releases its grip on extension and attributes - dies?) that there appears to be a release of some form of energy that continues on, but which also perhaps merges back into primordial uniformity.

Albeit with some associated mechanism (karma) that retains a memory of it's attributes. Wonder do charges have karma, or something analagous to it? i.e. that electrical energy contains information about the dyads that  folded to create it.

:o Maybe I've got it all wrong.

What's interesting too is that our perception of the existence of the above systems of dyads is presumably a consequence of our vantage point or state of consciousness? That somehow we can by moving higher along our line of awareness come to see it differently? For example the perception of differentiated 'things' and their attributes seems to be dependent on achieving the right state of consciousness. (the one we consider 'normal', but actually only one wavelength I guess)

This would be  a bit like the way we experience ourselves for example as undifferentiated awareness in higher states of consciousness, or as a differentiated self in normal C1 consciousness. Perhaps it somehow implies that differentiation is almost like some sort of 'crystallisation' process that occurs with reducing frequency of the energy that underpins everything.

A final thought. There's something incredibly slippery about the whole thing. Think even of our own body. We think we know what it is, but we've only got the sketchiest of conceptual views of what it is. (and that's not real, only a mind model) There's actually vast dimensions of it that we can't seem to experience at all, it's an almost totally autonomous vehicle with this awareness riding around in it like a sci-fi alien  - a brain in a machine.

We're maybe even an autonomous colony of smaller differentiated entities all struggling with their own version of this problem of perception.

Despite this we (quite arrogantly?) manage to presume total ownership of the bits we regard as self...

:) It's fun to speculate....

Hi Vajra-
The reason that we have a pervasive charge, or any other attribute, is that we have pulled space apart into different kinds of puckers and twists. This is not a stable static system, but it retains itself as a dynamic resonance. Like the standing waves of a sound echoing in a hall, or the radiations bouncing about inside a black body, combining as they echo and bounce together.  

Alan is corerect that this is another of those inexplicable things - but it isn't inexplicable. It's just extremely subtle. And I agree that "something about it is extremely slippery".

An electron, for example, can readily be represented by two resonances, inward and outward directed spatial resonances with 510 KeV charge. http://members.tripod.com/mwolff/point.html  Milo Wolff has done a nice job of presenting the electron's resonance. However, my impression is that you're more interested in where it comes from and goes to, as opposed of what it does while we're playing with it.

The slippery part is that none of this is real, at least not in the sense of Buddhist "aggregates". It's  only an "arrangement".  Like Wolff's electron, there's not really anything there except circulating probabilities of locating the quality of charge at some point in its orbit, while it is the orbit's action by which the space in which it revolves is defined.

Phrased differently, the tail creates a dog to wag it, while the dog defines its tail into existence to be wagged. One level down and there's nobody home. Just a bark awaiting a place to occur. And that puts us back at the old conundrum, which came first, the fireplug of the dog?  :)

To ask about the material nature of the origins of reality turns out to be most often the wrong question, and it returns a nonsensical answer. It's "not even wrong", as they say.

The way to fit this to Buddhist thought is through the Prajnaparamita Sutra - which is why they call it the "diamond cutter sutra". Start with emptiness.

So we can build an hypothetical reality from emptiness, probability, and logical consistency. On a nice clean sheet of emptiness, using only an imaginary compass and protractor, draw two shapes. Obviously, this is going to be difficult, so instead, you can find any two potential shapes that might have existed if someone had been there two draw them. These shapes occur in potential state space, and they are not "real and enduring forever" as  would be matter. Potential states are any states that might be defined or might occur under some set of conditions, including the shapes formed in your forebrain by your imagination, and they have no more reality than that.

So we now have set apart two "potential instances" of emptiness. The clearly have a logical relationship, both with one another, and also with others of their kind. It is the expansion of this ability to relate to others of their kind that gives rise to universal structure.  

Let's add some more of these potential shapes. They occur contingently to the existence of the first potentialities you defined, since we're holding onto those. However, now we are buiding up a network of the ways in which these non-things relate. Further, once we start looking at the potentialities for such shapes, we see that some are more probable, and some of the relationships they manifest are more probable than others. That gives us an expanding set of potentialities, with subsets internally related, and from which we find patterns of possible relationships emerging.

This has taken us from utter voidness to possibilities for contingent manifestation in a probability space, hence phase space. That creates a universe. There are obviously an infinite number of such universes. Each is internally defined as a stable dynamic system that expands by iterated complexions. (Complexion is Henri Poincare's term for what others calla "power set".)

Given an infinite number of potential universes, let me direct your attention to one of them in which all the potential interactions have taken up the shapes and patterns that would be found in a crowd of sentient beings picking cosmic lint out of their non-existent navels.  With respect to the viewpoint of one of those sentiencies, the entire universal shmear looks like a regular extended reality, made of rocks and roots, bricks and bathtubs. These guys can't tell the difference.

We live in that kind of place. It has no reality. It has no matter. It is defined only by dynamic relations. By reducing reality to a dynamic relativism we enable ourselves to occupy any potential universe that we can logically reach. Of course, because these universes are in potential state space they are eternal, just as eternal as emptiness.

For example, my non-real-but-seems-real world a week ago included a small pilonidal cyst on my forehead. I adopted Rei's approach of silent prayer and it now has vanished. The mechanism seems to be that we can have any imaginary universe just as easily as the one we're in. All we need to do is to go there. Prayer (aka meditation with God) simply makes one option more probable that the other, and change occurs. That's why I'm so fascinated by CS - they do this routinely.

This is exactly identical to a dream, except that God is the Dreamer, and we are the characters of the dream. It all resolves to the internal mumblings of Buddha-Mind, if you prefer. However, because of the tail-vs-dog problem we are also the dreamers as well as the dream, the actors in space, and the means by which space is defined so that we can be actors there.

It's not that you've got it wrong. To the contrary, Buddhism is an excellent expression of the truth of this. What's happening is that there are literally millions of equivalent expressions that are all partly correct and partly verbal analogies, and we get tangled up in the details rather than understanding the collectivity.

Following the tail-vs-dog, God is innate, immanent, occurring by its own nature within emptiness. That does not mean that God is a person, nor a buddha etc. God turns out to look a lot more like the thermodynamics of a non-populated Riemannian void that has the capacity to have potential states. But that means that the sentiency of God is located in us, and not in the original emptiness. However, the roots of that sentiency must be in the innate nature of God, which can be described as a collection of contingencies in emptiness. So now we have our minds projecting God, and God projecting our minds, and both projecting a place in which we live. But in the end it's still empty.

Better this time?

dave

:) Spot on D! I wasn't so much suggesting I didn't get at least a rough drift on what you were saying, more that I was trying to figure out some implications for our view of reality.

I guess I should have known that a 'charge' is basically an electron - so treatment of them as 'things' is not just for mathematical convenience. Even if the thing as you say (I wasn't suggesting it either) has no physical existence, is just a 'dynamic resonance'.

An interesting consequence is that the 'potential state space' you talk of sounds almost like the imagination of God - which (if you accept that 'mind creates') inherently includes some sort of inadvertent/inherent creative capability/intention too.

As before if you buy this sort of view our perception of a permanent and self existing self as before is quickly questionable in this 'non-reality made only by interacting 'dynamic relations'.

It suggests that this naturally arising view of how things are is actually the result of a sort of cosmic catch 22 -  we naturally (or at least are conditioned to naturally) perceive at the level of consciousness where these dynamic phenomena appear quite real, presumably because our naturally arising means of perception fuctions at that level. But that this as you know is only one of a potentially infinite number of levels or filters through which very different 'realities' can be perceived. So our view is necessarily highly partial.

It's only when by means of the expanded awareness we can activate with spiritual 'progress' or opening beyond the ego determined view that we can start to experience the fact that it  may not be the only 'take' on things.

We can of course by logical intellectual work ( as in the case of most of this stuff) too work our way to a logical theoretical position that predicts what we eventually will or may already have experienced. (or vice versa)

I'll not even attempt to go into the question of alternative dreams or realities, other than to say that for me things quickly complicate to the point where I think at least you have to throw in the towel,  and be awed by the wonder of God/primordial mind and retreat back to your everyday knitting.

The part I really struggle with is the God/first cause question. There's presumably some underlying energetic 'stuff' that God/mind kinks into the dynamic relations that create the appearance of this reality. Lynne McTaggart's book 'The Field' and the 'What the Bleep' film come to mind. But where did it come from?

It's clear as you say too that God or primordial mind seems distributed through this existence and so the tail wags the dog as well as vice versa (or is one), but I can't help feeling that we are maybe not intellectually equipped (our intellect is based on the logical/conceptual/time space reality) to get at this next level.

Buddhism talks of some of the various attributes of this state based on our limited view, but it doesn't get one very far. Perhaps becuause it may not have much relevance to wha we're supposed tobe focused on. Or else its  measure of jus how deeply immersed in this crazy reality, and how far removed that is from God.

;) I suppose it'd ll be a bit too much and would probably negate the existence of this reality but there's times I think it'd have been nice to have been born with God consciousness,  or at least a Ramana Maharishi ease of access to it....

Hi Vajra-
My impression is that we ARE born with God-consciousness. And our nannies and moms try immediatey to get us to forget it because it doesn't seem "real".

One of the problems in my expression of these concepts is that people insist on thinking of God as a person like we are. Aside from the aspect of awareness, I don't see this as useful. My approach has been to reduce the notion of God to the necessary aspects for creating a universe. There may be a great deal more - almost positively so - but the creation ex-nihilo aspect only requires that we can perform two things. First, we need to establish a dynamic loop, and Second, we need for the loop to project more space than is used to define it.

In this case, the elements of the loop process are the two aspects of emptiness, the vast and incommensurable, and the tiny and incommensurable. These e-merge from and re-merge into a null. That gives a loop. Now, if we take the e-mergent term and use it to form the cross space of what else is there (this adds a contingenecy - we can only do this in additive space) then we get "something for nothing".  Analytically, the initial loop is now carried forward indefinitely, interacting at every opportunity, so there is a core dynamic that remains Lie congruent forward, as a sort of "progress vector". Notice that this logical structure is present in virtually every interaction in everyday experience. - There's one real instance.

A second instance of this stuff in everyday experience is that the terms output from the loop dynamic contain nothing that was not input previously, albeit in various combinations. - This too we observe every day.

I'm fooling about with various configurations of 7-space to show how the internal resonances can lead to electrostatics, and eventually expression of charge as spatial resonances. An approach somewhat similar to Lisi's. - That would be another example.

Now, looking backwards at these activities, the nature of God needs only to be isomorphic with existence of additive space. Of course that brings in probability as a ratio between two additive sets, which projects God into Group theory. It also prompts interesting ideas such as the question, Is God Abelian? (I'd say no, since that's an unwarranted limitation - but it's an interesting example.)

Given all the above, I view God, in the manner of manifestation, as the innate properties through which this regenerative system has arisen, as well as the evolved properties after the fact. And in that sense we come back to the single contingency of additive space. Behavior in additive space looks to me like thermodynamics. That suggests that what we merge back into is the collective version of what we have here (which is sarvastarka samadhi) and when we look farther we discover, as Pulsar put it, "absolutely nothing, as if we had never existed" - which is the essence of God as innate, viewed from one of the aspects emergent from voidness. (nirvastarka samadhi)

In actual fact, my meditative image of God seems more to look like one of P A M Dirac's spinors - a sort of twist in emptiness - but I guess that it's a matter of attitude.

The other interesting thing, at least tio me, is that these concepts can be discovered in ancient pre-dynamtic Egyptian mysticism, and correlate with the Prajnaparamita Sutra quite well, as well as the Upanishads.

dave