Hi Bets,

Yes the void is darkness, but it is dark light that is teaming with pure awareness.  Babies and children that have NDE find themselves in this darkness and describe it as the ‘darkness that knows’ and this fits my NDE at age 7.  It is like being cuddled within a warm, wonderful, peaceful womb.  According to the research that has been done, people of all ages that have NDE have described three types of light. 

(From Atwater’s ‘Big Book’ of NDE)
“Symbolically, Primary Light is considered to be God Light; Dark Light is Mother Light; and Bright Light is Father Light.” 

The dark light I was surrounded with during my NDE at age 7 was a shimmering purple blackness.  In truth it felt like heaven or something similarly wonderful.

I might add that this NDE terrified me, but it wasn’t the darkness that terrified me.  On the outer edges of the darkness I could see several pairs of bright, piercing eyes watching me.  In my child mind I had no idea what these eyes were and they frightened me. I now as an adult know they were there to watch over me.

Love, Kathy

Dave,

“Primordial nothingness”

I find this theorized a state an impossible a concept beyond comprehension. It is a terrible, brain twisting minding bending concept that if you think  about for too long and too deeply you can go, psychotic Really! It as impossible to think deeply as infinity. Try thinking of a road that goes on without end. “Forever”. Your mind will in an attempt to escape the impossible will erect some sort of end barrier, but the problem remains where does the barrier end as it must and so on and so on adifinitum

Now in my view there was” never ever a state of nothing”, there has always been something and this something is what we call “existence”. The Void in our universe is not nothing but is “Space that can bend and zeeths with energy. The void you suggest seems to be some sort of a non-energetic emptiness but it is still a something.

The state of absolute nothingness is impossibility. You cannot get something from nothing; there is no absolute free lunch.

Near death experience’s, myself included often go into a dark Void. This appears to be something like the Catholic idea of Limbo.

Regards

Alan

I notice that we seem to be coming to a sort of tentative agreement about the suggestion I was making. God. Maybe if we can get more than two or three of us looking at it there might be a way to cast it into simpler terms and actually examine the premises involved. 

Eternity and infinity have been interesting problems for a long time. Cantor studied infinity and transfinite numbers, and attacked the notion in a manner that I attribute to Georg Hegel. Hegel's transcendental phenomenology simply took the notion that things come together to promote their collective nature, starting with the trivial, and winding up with his version of the Platonic Good.  Hegel's "Philosophical Propadeutics" makes good reading in that regard. Obviously I'm working with Hegelian ideas.

We can actually manipulate Cantor's trans-infinite cardinals, but it gets awkward to divide aleph-null (his first order infinity) by aleph-null and claim that we get unity, and then have to offer a reasonable proof. But if we look at two transfinite sets as one-to-one surjective, we can do it by nominal correlation. I don't want to go there, and I can see why Cantor got so wound up and frustrated when he did.

Alan's remarks about potentiality are to the point.  I don't believe that there has ever been "nothing" in the sense of total negation of both manifest and potential states. This is like "Barth's Dichotomy" - there are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide the world into two kinds, and those who don't. Alan evidently hasgrasped  the idea that I've been tinkering with, that potentiality is pervasive, and greatest where there is the least manifestation, as this means that the contingent aspects are least. So in my estimation, we can have "nothing that is too small to identify" or we can have "nothing that is so large you can't fill it", which is a dichotomy. That can be built upon, as it is a logically valid term, even if "nothing" happenes to not be valid.

Manifesting, which means actually showing up in the world, is tricky, because we believe in obdurate matter as having some kind of property of solidity that seems to be more than probability patterns in interaction. My suggestion is that what we are made of is, in good accord with Schroedinger's equation, is patterns of potential waves. In other words, nothing. Just twisted emptiness. If true, then our nature is based on emptiness defining itself with respect to itself, and doing so by virtue of the dichotomy of its basic nature.

In specific, if I have a pattern of probability waves that seem to relate to one another in the form of a particle with momentum, then that's all it takes for me to think of them as "matter". And if that's what the entire world is made of, then we can't tell the difference anyway.

The "two slit experiment" is interesting in this light. (If you want a refresher, try this site: www.altair.org/TwoSlit.html I've done this with a pocket laser and old scrap of film.) The usual interpretation is that there is a "quantum wave qualityof matter" that interferes. I suggest that since everything is simply waves of probability in the first place, there is no matter. What we have is sets of waves of probability passing through the apparatus. These interfere just as do water waves.

A probability wave is just a wave with a tendency toward something, or a tendency that is being expressed in the form of a wave. Like 100 screaming teeny boppers descending on a store selling the latest hit tunes. The wave has nothign to do with the carriers. Since we're dealing with combinations, each new addition brings at least a one bit of entropy yes-no decision. The bunch of these sort of hang out as a wave form. The probability is then for the wave to be detected by showing on a screen.

When there is only one slit open, interference is visible at the edges of the slit, but the wave mostly passes through unaffected, hence no interference pattern. Nota bene: there is no wave-versus-particle problem in this interpretation. It simply makes sense.

Huygens' principle tells us that a wave front looks like a line of wave generators, so that every point is a source. This is because each point along the wavefront is interacting with the next point, and does so in every direction at once, so that the wave spreads by virtue of interaction with context. Forwards is the only direction that doesn't cancel out. This sets up the two slit experiment as a way to look at one or more points along the Huygens wavefront.

If we go backwards in time to the origin, or sideways to the Hubble limit of today's universe, in both cases we encounter the same evolving wavefront. Thus, if we step back and look at this across all of time we see a single perpetual and universal creation everywhere ongoing, and spanning time and space as we think of them. Time and space are simply ways to put measures on this dynamic.

NOW - please - I'm willing to talk about this indefintely, but that misses the point. The point I wish to make is that we can find at least one way in which to see our reality as one point amidst a fantastic array of universes, all of which arise spontaneously, because the "making it arise" property of God, or "elan vital"  if you like Bergson, or the basic nature of love, creative joy and awareness in motion, seem to be immanent. This works because we are of the nature of God, which is how the voidness gains a dynamic. And, in addition, our specific situation seems to allow us to go on to carry the God-spark within us into the next phase of experience, so that we can give rise to a new universe.

I suggest that these considerations bear directly upon afterlife experiences.

dave

The mechanics of the idea are one aspect, but the idea of successive universal instantiations seems to me to be more interesting.

Hi Dave and other viewers of this thread,

I feel it necessary for those who are having shown interest in Dave’s provocative (stimulating) thread to simplify what we have being dialoguing about.

What is this process we call entropy? Here is a very easy explanation of its effect, think of an infinity-sealed room divided into two equal dimensioned separate compartments. Room one contains an enormous quantity of energy at a thousand degree Celsius. The other room is a total vacuum at absolute zero or total high entropy... There is a door separating the two rooms. A fan is placed betwwen the rooms, inside the cold vacuum room. The door is opened and the obvious happens, enegy flows from the hot high energy, low entropy room, into the higher colder entropy room, “moving the fan” while the flow of energy continues, until the temperature, equals between the two rooms. Both rooms having now the same state of entropy. no future use of the energy is possible. if this is a closed system, although all the energy is still all there but “The fan stops forever”... For now, entropy always moves from a hot state into a colder state. It is obvious one cannot warm up a room by taking energy from a colder room. The two rooms in the above example will equalize at five thousand degrees Celsius. The energy is all still there but cant be used. If we buy the big bang theory all the almost infinite energy in this titanic explosion that created our universe is still "here" "Energy cannot be created or lost only converted",  The universe is now unimaginable cold, just a tad above absolute zero. Why? when energy moves from a high temperature dense energetic state it expands, just like the gas in your fridge and cools down. Einstein saw this as an obstacle in his General theory and added a corrective formula to make it work as in his time the universe was not thought to expand as Erwin Hubble later found out

It is debated whether our universe is a closed system like the above, really simplified model. On the other hand, an open system where energy can drain off from the second room, into an infinitely VAST cold void forever. and the universe dies and decays in a cold dark heat death. The jury as Dave said is still out on this possible bleak outcome. “Proton decay”

Of course, the physics of this is much more complex but I feel my explanation suffices for the forum.

How does all this relate to the afterlife experience? Well because of the flow of entropy or physical bodies” die”. The other approaches that Dave has put forward, if I read him right he is concerned with the "how and "why" of existence, the source of what we call god, dimensions of reality such as multiple universes, parallel universes, different universes with different fundamental constants, planes, levels and realms of reality beyond physical life, and where the exist in the reality of the great ALL that I call “AM”

Regards

Alan.

     I            

I'd like to point out the other interpretation of probabilistic mechanics - and I can do this without the notion of entropy or thermodynamics ...  except that it can also be described in those terms etc...

Take two ideas, like your SO's name and your SO's phone number, or any other two ideas. Call them A and B. To write A, your SO's name, in yopur address book does not use it up - you can still write the name in other places, like the bathroom walls, kitchen ceiling, or on checks randomly gathered at the bank.

Putting information B, the phone number, in your book does not use it up either. You can still add that to the scribble in your bathroom - "For a good time call (111) 555-1212. Ask for Godzilla." or whatever pleases you.

To manipulate information in a manner that does not get it used up is called "an operation with replacement", meaning that as fast as you use the information, it is available to be used elsewhere as well.

Let's start with the information lying about on slips of paper. Now count the ways of getting information A. If we exclude the rest of the world and simply stick to the place you have your address book, then there is some probability that you will accidently discover this information, by chance alone. There is an equal chance of discovering information B.

Now, take both information A, your SO's name, and information B, thir phone number, and write them in your book. Two things occur:

(1) You have now increased the number of instances of the information, which means that it is now more probable that as you blunder about, the chances of encountering that information have increased. Because the information is now more probable than it was before, we say that the state of forming combinations leads to a reality that is more probable than the state prior to forming the combinations. 

(2) The joined information, A + B now has properties that the initial bits of information did not have. That is called synergy. It means that something new has been added. Like putting a basket of parts together from one of those boxes marked 'Some Assembly Required" - and a few hours later having a bicycle, or  a manure spreader.

We now come to a division of the ways of looking at things - In the traditional perspective, we look at the mixing of the parts as being an aspect of the initial basket of stuff. We ignore synergies. That way, we wind up with the same number of parts as we had when we began, and we have Boltzmann's statistics, and the usual description of entropy.

However, let's look at the properties of the parts, rather than at the parts themselves. For convenience, let's call every term that we can discover by a separate name, and give it a separate and distinct identity. In that way, color is distinct property. Size is a distinct property. Mass is a distinct property. And, after we have analyzed things as well as possible, we have a basket of properties, the attributes by which a thing is known. And, since all relationships occur by joining attributes, when we add a new gizmo to an old gadget, we create a few new properties by synergy.  Synergy is simply creation of new attributes of the collective by joining properties of the parts that go into it.

Now, when we are counting the properties of some collective that is evolving, if it can add its parts together, it gives back more properties than went into it.  "Name A" differs from "Number B", and "Name and Number A+B" differs from both of them.

So in this approach to stability of cumulative aggregates, the most stable state is that inw hich the maximum number of combinations has occurred, because that distributes the information as much as possible, creating a maximum number of new ways to obtain it. Having increased the number of presentations, the attrutes of the aggregate have increased their probability, which is essentially the same as their dynamic stability.

So here we have another way to view statistical thermodynmic processes. The first way is equal numbers in varied arrangements. The second way is increasing numbers in every possible arrangement. (And, of course, that means that every change leads to a whole bunch of additional changes that can be made - it's a never ending forward going sequence of creation.) It is this second way to view things that I suggest as a cosmogenetic process. 

My support for this is that this process can be modelled as an iterated complexion, and it  (experimentally!)  fits nearly perfectly with the generation of knowledge in society. I suggest that it also fits what we view as the material world, but that the material world is actually made of information, and not material, so that combinations with replacement always occur. 

Of course, not all possible properties of everything will be present everywhere at the same time. Some properties of the world remain hidden due to the way we live and look at them.

As I write this I feel a bit like one of Harry Potter's inept friends trying to wave my wand and get a little universe hovering in the air - except that it keeps going Pffft! and making a puff of smoke as it vanishes. However, maybe I'm gaining a bit on the problem of expression.

dave

Greetings, --Dave,

Are you saying that your system illustrates the idea that as matters are reconstituted, they can recombine to  form whatever our thoughts are centerring on? For example, so that hydrogen released from a decayed hydrogen bomb could reconsititute into water ?

How would something less material be reconstituted? Would there be a difference between what can be reconstituted from a scream as compared to what comes from a loving murmer? Or are they both just water and carbon, etc?

Or is that off track and it all breaks down to Yes or No, like basic computers, before it can be reused.

Bets

Hi Bets,

Yes you are correct, any dark void or other has  emormous potential to be filed.  There is, and there never was, a state of nothingness a total impossibity in the existing reality around us. "Let there be light"

Love

Alan