Ever feel like you're insignificant? Well...don't look at this...

Dark One as keyboard breaks.

I'd assume that within identical finite boundaries greater than 1 that the former would be larger than the latter and that this would hold true to infinity.

Actually if your brain swelled to twice it's size, it wouldn't ooze out your ears.

Due to taking up four times the volume, and intercranial pressure, it's SQUIRT out your ears, nose and mouth (as it explodes through your soft palate and sinus cavity), and probably pop your eyes out.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Best part?



You're watching this on Bravo, Hype. I realize you probably took this picture from the interwebz, but from now on, I'm going to imagine you watching Bravo.

All the time.

Sounds about right, knowing my luck...

Well, "larger" is hard to compare for things that are infinitely large. We can't usefully count how many there are - in both cases the answer is "infinitely many". So we compare them in a way that doesn't require counting them - instead, we pair them up. Imagine you're setting a large table - you know you need a lot of forks and knives, and you need the same number of each, but counting that many of them would take a long time. Instead, you can start putting them in pairs: if you run out of forks, you had more knives; if you run out of knives, you had more forks. If every knife ends up paired with a fork, you must have had the same amount of each. We can say the same when we try to pair up the integers with the perfect squares, or for an even less intuitive example, pairing the integers with the rationals.
Lots of weird things happen when you deal with infinities. Another example is Hilbert's Hotel.

Edit:
Which direction does it not double in, if it's 4x volume?

You want some real brainmelters.... take a gander.

I can't help but laugh at how ridiculous some of them sound.

My favorites are

Millinillion and Quinquagintacentillion

@Oathbound & @Oathbound Too

But of course science is going to keep looking anyway. That's what science is all about. We're going to keep doing experiments and keep making observations. Maybe one day we'll crack this. Or maybe we won't. But we shouldn't give up.

Yes, I'm well familiar with the simulated world idea in relation to the nature of time. But then the next question arises, how can we prove this is a simulation or not? It never stops.

And as you point out there are lots of ideas about what time is and how it works. Hopefully physics will allow us to discard the speculations that are false and let us focus on the ones that might be true. Science is all about falsifiability.

But that's just it, if the universe is big enough your uniqueness fades away. That's one of the many implications of the Boltzman Brain:

• Richard Feynman of Boltzman Brains
• Wikipedia article on Boltzman Brains

Now it may be that the universe is sufficiently small that we are all unique but this still isn't saying much cosmically speaking. And considering the cruelties we level on each other, it seems that humans don't really value that uniqueness very much either.

Assuming forks are the integers and knives are the square: when you have 1 to 3 forks you only have 1 knife, when you have 4 to 8 forks you only have 2 knives, when you have 25 forks you only have 5 knives. The more forks you have the wider the disparity between forks and knives becomes. Thus, as the number expands infinitely you'll have infinitely fewer knives.

If you're comparing a finite number of them, sure, but that isn't what we're talking about when we talk about the cardinality of the entire, infinitely-large set.

This really isn't an isolated result - there are quite a lot of things that behave a certain way at every finite point, and act completely different in the limit at infinity.

I don't think anyone would ever create a "simulated reality." There's no point. From the scientific point of view by the time we can simulate it in the way we'd want or need to do to simulate a reality such as ours we'd have already lived through it and not need it. All our simulation technology will go toward larger scale models, smaller scale models, and creative pursuits...

Also I'd say there are 3 coming AI types.
Mechilects: AI that does some pre-set function... Such a red shirt in ST:TOS

Artilects: AI that are characters that act like a real person and all that, but have blocks that prevent them from realizing they are not "real" and have quirks and feelings of some sort that are pre-described.

Sentient Artilects (haven't come up with a good name): These grow and learn and don't have pre-described personalities/feelings. These can be "born" or be created by removing the blocks and controls of the Artilects...

The best example might be Star Trek episodes that deal with the Holodeck... Characters on the holodeck that are main characters in the scenario are Artilects. Background characters are Mechilects. Moriarty from TNG is a sentient artilect.

It doesn't really act differently unless you ignore what's going on and just look at the end. It's like saying the tortoise is as fast as the hare because they're both at the finish line, or a milliliter is equal to a liter because they both filled up a swimming pool.

If you have infinitely many milliliters, or wait an infinitely long time for both to finish the race, yeah, in a sense they are, although cardinality is a mathematical concept, not a physical one, thus it's not a great analogy. We're ONLY talking about what happens AT infinity here, looking at the end as you said. If you want to know what happens at the end, you look at the end, it doesn't matter what happens before the end.

But really, I fear we're getting off-topic talking about cardinality in a thread about the scale of the universe.

It seems like absurd Wonderland Mathematics to me - which is to say I understand it conceptually AND it doesn't make sense, pragmatically speaking. And I'd say it's about on par with exploring Universal scale from micro to macro as a mental exercise.

Save for the fact the the universe is the most significant thing to exist... or whatever it does. Without the universe the rest of everything doesn't exist to have significance ^.^

"Significant" is a very vague and subjective term, so until you come up with a clear definition for it that everyone agrees on, you also won't be able to make any clear statements about significance that everyone will agree on.

Prove that it is important to me. It can't be done.

Mechanically,it is impossible for significance to exist without a universe, but the importance of that to any individual (real or theoretical) is arbitrary. Imposing the standard of "which factor of is more important to having perception to which significance can exist" is also arbitrary, since any necessary factor that is missing means that perception can't exist.


(Sorry if I didn't get the edit in time. My computer is running *really* slow right now for no discernible reason).

This is more a confusion of language.
You're saying significant as "this thing has meaning to me"
Where as "Important" is what is the more logical definition to apply... and things that are important are also things that are "this thing has meaning to me"

Oh, but there is a further misunderstanding now that I think about it, because the "this thing has meaning to me" definition is not "I am ascribing meaning to this" but rather "This thing is indicative of being important (to)"

You can use it however you like, but looking at the definition it seems you are using the word wrong >.>

"Important" is just as subjective and vague as "significant". So no, that doesn't get around the problem.

The Revenge of the Nerds was the rise of the personal computer and the Internet. Now we run the planet, give you rick-rolls, iPads, the EFF and anti-SOPA protests, TVTropes, ceiling cat and hot and cold running porn that's too cheap to meter.

Speculation concerning the hyperoperators, transfinites or busy beaver numbers is just part of our nerdy package, along with the role-playing games and the Trek uniforms at science fiction conventions. Apologies. Our often maligned and feared intellect and creativity made all these nice things happen. No, Ogre, we will not fix your computer until you acknowledge that and are nice to us, dig?

Well there might be a point to it if we discover there is no multiverse, no alternate histories or parallel universes to explore or if they are impossible for us to get to.

If that's so, maybe one day we'll build computers out of the nucleonic matter of neutron stars just to have simulators powerful enough to simulate the Earth down to atomic granularity.

I don't know.

One of my points to Arcanaville was that if we lived in such a simulation maybe there might be ways to prove we live in a simulation.

But my main point was that learning what time is and how it works is a scientific question.

If we learn that we're pretty much screwed. What will happen then is like that we will go into a largely dormant state, just enough to run a censor that will awaken us when the universe returns to a state we can exist in... if we're lucky... or we figure a way to manipulate the very laws of our universe so that we can stop ourselves from being torn apart.

There was somewhere that posed an idea or two of how we would know and there are or were legitimate experiments being run a few years back or are still in the process of running... Personally I think that it'd be obvious to spot if we were of the Sentient Artilect level of AI in a simulation mainly because magic would have to exist. A programmer would have to build in commands and also any programmer having the resources to do it would also want a way to observe, control, and access any part of the simulation as well as to get out of it which means that every person would have to have access to those commands and just not know it. And if we attribute our level intelligence and exploration to things it is unlikely that we wouldn't have stumbled upon that stuff by now and passed it along. Also you'd have to go with Sentient Artilects because Artilects or Mechilects would never produce the desired results of seeing a society runs because you'd be putting limits on there and breaking the experiment.


Also as far as time is concerned... there's a paper out there that i heard about like a year back about how particles seem to go to a "null space" where in you have 1 instant then you have those particles going to a null space and rearranging themselves and then coming back out of that null space to create the next instant.... That seems to be rather logical if you think about it from the mathematical side of things that supports (i think) 11 spatial dimensions
(1 length, 2 height, 3 depth) = 1 point in time as we know it
(4 linear time, 5 and 6 different time lines?) = basically all the multiple world theories
(7, 8, 9) = all the different "universal constants" or membranes or something like that
10 = the changes of all those or some such
11 = Everything statically existing

That's obviously not 100% correct but close enough...

See What we considr time is just moving through the 4th dimension, but if we were to take "time" and consider it like 3 dimensional space, just with each point represent 1 point in the time-space-multiverse for us and then we're able to step into that realm, there is still "time" it is just us moving through that 7,8,9 set of dimensions the same way we do the 4,5,6 dimensions. So technically we can jump 2 tiers and still experience "time" It's the idea of the 11th dimension and existing outside of that that is really odd because the 11th dimension is everything. All possibility. all time. All space. All existence. Outside of that there is "nothing" and because we can roughly explain time inside that construct, outside of it is a wholly different thing...which is technically a non-thing.

The problem at that point is that you can go metaphysical and/or using the idea that if one all exists then outside that all there must be infinite alls that exist in a space of "existence" so that "existence" becomes this sorta magical construct but at that point the concept is absurd...beyond what people used to consider absurd in that there is more than one universe. When I talk about the 11 dimensional construct I'm talking about all possibility where as when we're talking about the Universe as we used to we're simply talking about a physical object that contains all things and really didn't take into account time or possibility.

I imagine this ultimate reality as sort of an infinite amount of unchanging crystal spheres all in neat rows and columns, but that's just to understand the concept a bit more easily.


Here's a little thing that may mess with your brain...There could be an entity that eats universes so that it destroys the past of a universe. This entity would work at one of the higher tiers of spatial dimensions obviously, but because of the way that universe works even as this creatures eats a universe and destroys it... it simultaneously does and does not exist because the fact that the 11th dimension requires that there is no change.

Further more, it is completely possible/probable that if we can create and manipulate universes to a certain level death is somewhat irrelevant to the individual because each person through out time could be snatched up and taken to an alternate universe or future that allows them to continue existing even while they are "dead" and because of how time for 1 universe is not directly correlated to another that version of you that has already died could have already existed for billions of years already even though you haven't died "yet"

The real question is whether or not you can decouple yourself from linear time while in the flow of linear time and then move backward and forward in it. in programming i guess it would be like creating a separate object where you're rooted in your own bubble universe type thing so you experience time going forward yet you're able to move backwards allowing you to see time reverse...