More Anomalies: Another Top Baker’s Dozen: Part Two

From the cosmic to the quantum; from the macro to the micro; from the natural world to the human world, enigmas are everywhere. Here’s another baker’s dozen worth.

You may not be happy with the world as it is, but at least it’s orderly and makes logical sense. Walk, don’t walk, green yellow red; money trickles in, money flows out; friends and politicians come and go, enemies and stuff accumulate; the sun rises and sets, the moon waxes and wanes; people are born, people die; the days, weeks, months, seasons. and years come and go with regularity. But dig a bit deeper beneath the surface and the world and the cosmos it inhabits, is one anomalous place.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

CATTLE MUTILATIONS: There’s no disputing the bona-fides of this gruesome reality. It has been observed – after-the-fact – photographed, documented, and investigated by all manner of officialdom, as well as unofficial private investigators. And though oft referred to as ‘cattle’ mutilations, all manner of wildlife and other domestic livestock have been targeted too, the first reported case being a horse. Like the crop circle phenomena, there are three possible explanations: natural, human or alien.

If natural, why has this phenomenon only become an issue since the 1960’s? Predator-prey relationships, scavengers, etc. have existed and been observed ever since humans have inhabited the continents. There should be no anomaly here if animal mutilations are just the normal continuation of Mother Nature in tooth and claw. But there is an anomaly. If predators or scavengers, why are there no footprints, and especially if predators, why no signs of a struggle? How can predators account for precision removal of just certain body parts with razor sharp incisions? Since there’s no blood associated with the mutilated carcasses, did predators drink up their entire victim’s blood like an animal version of Dracula?

If humans or cultists are responsible, why hasn’t anyone claimed responsibility? Why hasn’t anyone been caught, tried, convicted, fined and/or imprisoned for trespass, animal cruelty, destruction of private property, etc.? Why no signs of human activity like tire tracks and footprints and litter (say a cigarette butt or beer can or two). Again, why no signs of a struggle?

Some have suggested this is the work of government, or government departments, taking samples to monitor for various bovine nasties, like diseases, or other types of contamination that could endanger human health if these livestock were consumed.  Really! There are vastly easier ways of legally gathering up tissue samples than sneaking around in the dead of night and killing/mutilating animals for a few body parts.

So of course it has to be extraterrestrials! How can aliens mutilate cattle (and other livestock and wildlife), decade after decade, without ever being seen? Why would aliens be interested in wildlife and livestock in the first damned place, or at least some of their highly selected body parts?  

HUMAN CULTURE & CIVILIZATION: There are two relatively unexplained turning points in the evolution of modern man when contrasted with our more primate-like ancestors. One is the acquisition of what we call culture. Culture (like art appreciation and abstract ideas like an afterlife) happened within a fairly narrow timeframe, roughly 50,000 years ago, wherever nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers gathered. Why the sudden transition? The second great leap forward, again, within a narrow timeframe, some 9000 years ago, was the transition from nomadic lifestyles to settlements – farming crops and herding now domesticated wildlife. Settlements rapidly became villages became towns became cities. While some nomadic hunter-gatherers still roamed the plains, like the Australian aboriginal, what was once that nomadic rule now became that exception to that rule. In both cases, culture and civilization, the observational evidence is rock-solid; theory can’t really explain the transition, or at least the relatively rapid transition, around the world, from the tried-and-true before-the-fact pre-cultural nomadic lifestyle to the unknown leap of an untested experiment with culture and settlements. 

ANCIENT EGYPT: LIGHTING THE PYRAMIDS, etc. We all are aware that many of the ancient Egyptian structures, like pyramids and the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, contain vast numbers of deep and twisting passageways inside. Many of those interiors have been elaborately decorated with all manner of paintings and carvings of hieroglyphs, etc. Whether or not the interiors were decorated, there must have been a requirement for lighting. There were no glass windows. There were no battery-operated torches or flashlights. There was no electric lighting back then, though of course that’s how these structures are illuminated today for tourists and/or archaeologists. Neither source of available luminescent technology back then really holds a candle as it were to how they could have been actually employed. The obvious sources were burning torches, oil lamps, candles, etc. Now you don’t really want to undertake construction, detailed painting or carving stone by candlelight. In any event there are no traces of soot residue on the walls and ceilings. The alternative method was to position bronze or copper mirrors that reflect sunlight onto another mirror which in turn reflected that light onto another mirror further inside the structure which in turn reflected the light it received onto the next mirror down the line, etc. The physics problem is that the original sunlight gets so diluted so quickly after just a couple of mirrors in, that it becomes an impractical ways and means. If you have to penetrate very far inside the structure, and some passageways are indeed, very, very far inside, lighting with mirrors fail. The anomaly is you need adequate lighting yet there’s no really adequate source.  

EXODUS, BOOK OF: There are multi-dozens of anomalies, things that just can’t be, reported in the Bible. Of all of these, the most anomalous is the Book of Exodus, because some of the events recorded there can be checked against another independent historical source. If the history in the Book of Exodus is found wanting, and it is, then if one holy book goes down the gurgler, then all the rest of the books are suspect too.

The anomaly here is that the Book of Exodus features the land and peoples of ancient Egypt fairly prominently. A couple of key Biblical characters play leading roles there – Moses and Joseph – not to mention thousands of alleged Hebrew slaves. Nasty things happen to that land and those peoples like the ten plagues and the drowning of pharaoh’s army. The anomaly here is that you’d expect ancient Egyptian records to verify and collaborate and substantiate the Book of Exodus, but you don’t find anything of the sort. It’s as if the Biblical version took place in a parallel universe – or in the imagination of the all too human author.

BIBLICAL MIRACLES: Then there’s this Biblical bit about Joshua commanding the sun to stand still (at least that’s the way I recall it). That’s a tall tale or myth but whatever, it can’t be a physical reality. But wait, there’s more! There’s Jonah and the whale; Eve’s creation from a rib; walking on the waters; the walls of Jericho tumbling down at the sound of no doubt out of tune trumpets or rams horns. In the Bible we have this tale of the multiplying of loaves and fishes out of virtually nothing.

Miracles are part and parcel of any and all supernaturally based religions. Miracles of the supernatural kind (and that’s the only kind of miracle that counts here) violate one or more laws, principles or relationships established by science. There can be no such thing as a supernatural miracle in theory. However, there have been numerous reports of supernatural miracles.

Reported events cannot violate the natural state of things. If they do violate that natural state of things, then they must be supernatural. There’s no known theory that can accommodate supernatural events. That’s part of the conflict between science and religion. The conflict is an anomaly.  

THE AFTERLIFE: A concept that closest to the hearts and minds of nearly all humans and human cultures past and present is what happens to us after we kick the bucket. The answer is we transcend into another life – an afterlife. Every culture, past and present, has an afterlife concept, a life after death concept, or some sort of an eternity or immortality worldview. Not all of the versions of the theoretical afterlife can be correct however. Idealistic theoretical expectations that when you die you won’t stay dead, versus practical reality that observations show that dead things stay dead, are indeed conflicting, therefore anomalous. However, nobody has ever come back from the dead to prove the reality of an afterlife to the satisfaction of any unbiased referee.

From the examples above, I conclude that it almost seems as if someone (something) is ultimately responsible for our Universe, but he / she/ it / they didn’t quite think things through sufficiently. Methinks an all knowing, all powerful supernatural God type being wouldn’t have stuffed things up. So either the Universe is naturally stuffed up, or it was created stuffed up!

Our Simulated Universe: Part Two

Introduction: You don’t exist! I don’t exist either! At least we don’t exist in the way that we think we do. We’re simulated beings, maybe wetware simulated (as in someone else’s dream), more likely as not software simulated, like the characters in a video game.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

OOPS: Tweaking, Miracles, Upgrades and Patches: So say you feel like playing God and creating a universe, not a real one of course but a simulated one, on your supercomputer (which presumably has greater capacity than your wetware brain which could also create one). So, you (the Supreme Simulator) start writing the initial ‘in the beginning’ set(s) of software with a view to creating a Big Bang and dictating the parameters that will control the subsequent evolution of your cosmos. Of course, not being a real God, it’s hard to think of everything and initially Part ‘A’ may not mesh totally well with Part ‘B’, and by the time you get to Part ‘Z’, everything’s an absolute mess. So, you start rewriting and revising and patching things up by tweaking the software here and there so that you end up, down the track, with a cosmos that’s a unified and consistent whole.

Oops #1 – Part ‘A’ created matter; Part ‘B’ you dictated and created an equal amount of antimatter, making Parts ‘C’ through ‘Z’ pretty irrelevant because your cosmos is now pretty boring – just a universe of pure energy!  So, tweak #1 is to create Part ‘B’ but under the surface set the value to an extremely low number. You now have a matter dominated universe.

Oops #2 – In Part ‘C’ you create gravity along with your matter so as to keep your universe orderly and behaving in a nice clockwork way. Oops, your universe now quickly contracts and undergoes a Big Crunch – end of evolution; end of simulation. Tweak #2: create some antigravity in the form of Dark Energy to prevent that Big Crunch while allowing gravity to maintain the desired clockwork predictability.

Oops #3 – Having taken care of the macro (you’ve evolved your matter via gravity into planets and stars and galaxies and associated debris) in Part ‘D’, you now polish off the software, all the bits and pieces needed to control the micro – Part ‘E’. Oops, you find that turns out not to be compatible with your macro software. Well, that apparently has no actual bearing on the other parts of your cosmic creation and since you’re ultra busy dealing with 1001 other problems and issues, you don’t bother to tweak this. You ignore this – no one will be any the wiser! (Oops, you didn’t plan on the eventual evolution of cosmologists and quantum physicists!!)

OOPS: Why Are Miracles A Tweak? A miracle is something unexplained and unexplainable. It’s a direct violation of the known laws of science. To my mind, a miracle is something that corrects a mistake; a mistake that never should have happened in the first place if the Supreme Simulator had been on the ball. For example, say you have to have a limb amputated, only at a later date it grows back! That’s a miracle that corrects what presumably the Supreme Simulator hadn’t counted on or programmed or desired. So, count up the number of alleged miraculous events that have been recorded over the eras of human history – that’s a lot of alleged tweaks!

Why Don’t I Know This? If you and everything around you (out to the farthest boundaries of the Universe) are just a simulation (created either inside the wetware mind or as software in a machine – the Supreme Simulator’s supercomputer) you wouldn’t know. You’d be programmed not to know or otherwise plain ignorant in the same way that the character in your dream in unaware it’s a mental creation – an artefact of your mind. Ditto the characters in a video game – they don’t know they are an artificial creation; an artificial life form. Since you are a simulated entity, you are not in control since you are pre-programmed and have to just go with the predetermined flow – the Supreme Simulator’s puppet. You can no more control your activity than a calculator can help but calculate that the cube root of 27 is 3. Ditto the entity in your dreams does what your mind commands it to do, even if you aren’t aware at the time that your mind is a puppeteer. Your dream character(s) has/have no free will in other words.

Never-the-less there may be ways to come to terms with the correctness or otherwise of the basic scenario that you are simulated and a Supreme Simulator is in control. The hint comes from the above – the need for The Boss to tweak their simulation creation to eliminate discrepancies or paradoxes, which is the same as saying there’s evidence that the Supreme Simulator has failed to tweak. The fact that tweaks are necessary in our natural environment is suggestive that we are indeed in a simulation; otherwise parts of the Universe (assuming it’s really real) make no real sense. Either Mother Nature screwed up, or the Supreme Simulator did. The fact that macro and micro physics don’t mesh is but one illustration. Another is that matter on the micro scale has a wave/particle duality. A third is quantum entanglement, where two objects can influence each other at faster than light speeds.

Mysteries abound when something can not be, yet apparently is. One whole set of issues here revolves around the conflict between what theory says isn’t possible, yet what eyewitness testimony says is. Translated, it’s the sceptics vs. the ‘I know what I saw’ mob. A tweak could resolve their differences.

Example: Take the Loch Ness Monster and related lake monster sightings. Biologists claim that one can not have a viable population of large creatures in such a confined space. You need a relatively large population for reproductive purposes and a large food supply for same, all in a relatively small volume. It should be easy to verify the existence of large animals in a natural cage. On the other hand, you have to account for, and then discredit all eyewitness testimony. A tweak could resolve the differences.

Example: Crop circles exist. No explanation for their existence makes total sense. They are obviously made by intelligence, but Mother Nature isn’t the guilty party in this case (although Mother Nature is responsible for some geometrical shapes like the spirals in some sea shells, flowers, snowflakes, etc.). No known natural force can account for crop circles. Human intelligence is the most likely explanation, but problems abound like the making of complex patterns in the dark of the night and why haven’t those responsible been caught and dealt with? I could list other problems like why England and not Australia? Surely Australia has its share of pranksters. Is an extraterrestrial intelligence responsible perhaps? But what’s their possible motive? I’m damned if anything rational comes to the fore. So, I think a tweak is in order here for this puzzlement has gone on far too long

As a general rule of thumb, just about anything science says is near impossible, yet for which there’s some degree of credible eyewitness testimony to the contrary, might be a candidate as a quirk courteous of our Supreme Simulator! Collectively, these topics fall under a general umbrella called ‘anomalies’ and whole books can be read that are full of case histories. For example, your attention is directed to the many volumes compiled by William R. Corliss of anomalies culled from the scientific literature in his Sourcebook Project series. Then there are those wonderful collections of anomaly tomes penned by Charles Fort.

Mysteries abound where something should or shouldn’t be, yet apparently isn’t or is. There often is a conflict between what sciences theoretically say should or should not be, yet scientific observations end up producing opposite findings. Perhaps the conflict between theory and observation/experiment is evidence that our Universe needs tweaking.

Example: Theoretical physics predict that the vacuum energy should have a certain value. Experimental evidence suggests that the vacuum energy is 120 orders of magnitude less than theory predicts. This by the way is the greatest discrepancy between theory and observation ever recorded in all of science. A tweak could resolve the differences. Another case, noted above, is that theoretical physics says there should be equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the Universe. Observation says that theory is just plain nuts because we don’t detect any antimatter remotely close to that predicted!

So why are these discrepancies allowed to continue? Why hasn’t the Supreme Simulator tweaked these? My best guess is that probably its because having set the simulation program in motion, and since none of the quirks are serious enough to cause the program simulation to crash, it’s easier just to allow everything to run its course and not ‘end program’ for the sake of relatively major, but not Universe-threatening, repairs. Minor fixes, like those ‘miracle’ tweaks can be fixed on the run without interrupting the simulation, just like some upgrades to your computer software can take place while you work, while others don’t take effect unless you shut down and boot up again. If you can soldier on and not shut down your operation and live without the upgrade(s), that’s okay.

So does that mean our Supreme Simulator, The Boss, is at least 13.7 billion years old since the program running our (presumably) simulated Universe is 13.7 billion years old because it’s been 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang? Not really, since there doesn’t have to be any relationship between time as experienced by the Supreme Simulator and our perception of time, just like you can watch a two hour movie, but as far as the characters in the movie are concerned, perhaps two days, two weeks, two months, two years or two decades have elapsed. So, perhaps one second passing to The Boss is the equivalent of a decade going by the boards to us.

And just like watching a movie, you can speed the film up, or slow it down – even freeze frame it if you’re so inclined. Now if our Supreme Simulator decided to speed up, slow down, even freeze frame (stop) the action, we wouldn’t notice because all of our surroundings would be speeded up, or slowed down, or stopped by the exact same amount (which has some obvious parallels with general relativity).

To be continued…

Evidence for Our Multi-Path Virtual Reality: Part Three

Observations don’t always agree with theory. That’s not usually a problem as theorists can often accommodate the observations as often the error bars around the measurements are wide enough to accommodate the theory. But, when observation and theory really collide, especially when it comes to those fundamental Big Questions, and also especially with the conflicts continue over many, many, years; then it’s time for Mr. Spock to raise those eyebrows! However, there is an easy solution, albeit one which won’t sit well with 99.99% of readers. The solution is that you, the reader, don’t exist! Well you do exist, just not in a real reality sense but as a virtual reality created by others. What’s the evidence?

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

UNIQUENESS: In the real world, the macro world, the classical world, no two things are identical down to the last microscopic detail – you are unique; every bacterium is unique; every house, den, nest, and ant hill is unique; so is every baseball and grain of sand. In the unreal world, the micro world, the quantum world, all fundamental particles of their own kind (i.e. electrons or positrons or up-quarks or photons) are identical to the last measurable detail. Why? Who knows!

Theory: In the macro world, no two things are identical, so in theory, the micro world should follow suit.

Observation: In the micro (quantum) world, all the individuals of any species of fundamental particle are identical to any degree of precision that you care to descend to.

Conflict: The macro world and the micro world appear to be fundamentally different, yet the macro world is built up from micro foundations which should imply that all baseballs for example should be 100% identical.

Discussion: A possibility from the ETI simulated universe hypothesis is that there is one software code or sequence of bits and bytes for each type of fundamental particle. So every time that sequence is used, you get that type of entity and only that type. All baseballs aren’t unique because as backdrop items, the software don’t construct them using the exact same number of that sequence of bits and bytes.

PHYSICAL CONSTANTS: There are constant reports of physical constants that aren’t – constant that is.

Theory: Physical constants are just that – a constant. They have just one value, everywhere, everywhen, and no exceptions.

Observation: Apparently some ‘constants’ have more than one value depending of where and/or when.

Conflict: Theory and observations (if correct) are yet again not in harmony.

Discussion: That’s totally nuts! Of course computer software is often in need of tweaking or upgrading, which is what physical constants that aren’t constant might represent – ETI tweaking their virtual reality software.

TIME TRAVEL: Time travel to the past is a staple of science fiction, but surprisingly has actual viability in modern relativity physics.

Theory: In physics, time travel to the past is theoretically possible – though damned difficult in practice. However, that means that those time travel paradoxes are possible, even likely.

Observation: No time travellers have been observed from our future; nobody from our present or past has time travelled back in time and left a proof-positive calling card that we’ve ever found in the history books or the fossil record.

Conflict: If something is possible, especially something as interesting as time travel, we would expect to see either people from our future in the here and now, or evidence that we’ve travelled to the past, like finding a human skeleton buried inside a T-Rex skeleton, as in inside the area where the T-Rex’s abdominal cavity would be! We don’t.

Discussion: Paradoxes like going back in time, say ten years, and killing yourself (which is a novel way of committing suicide), means you couldn’t have existed to go back in time in the first place in order to kill yourself, which means you’re not dead so you can go back in time and murder yourself, etc. What kind of physics is that? Maybe virtual physics, the kind generated by ETI.

MIRACLES: Miracles are part and parcel of any and all supernaturally based religions.

Theory: Miracles of the supernatural kind (and that’s the only kind of miracle that counts here) violate one or more laws, principles or relationships established by science. There can be no such thing as a supernatural miracle in theory.

Observation: There have been numerous reports of supernatural miracles.

Conflict: Reported events cannot violate the natural state of things. If they do violate that natural state of things, then they must be supernatural. There’s no known theory that can accommodate supernatural events. That’s part of the conflict between science and religion. 

Discussion: Any and all miracles, Biblical or otherwise, are explainable as easily as saying “run program”.

THE PARANORMAL: More down to earth, you have multi-observations of things like the Loch Ness Monster, those highly geometrically complex crop circles, and ghosts, yet there’s no real adequate theory that can account for their observed existence or creation.

Theory: You can theoretically debunk, or explain away, the idea that ‘sea’ serpents exist in Loch Ness; that crop circles cannot be related to any sort of natural or human activity; that ghosts can exist.

Observation: There are thousands of observations that the Loch Ness Monster exists; there’s no disputing that crop circles exist and are hard to explain as mundane events; and belief in ghosts via actual sighting accounts goes back as far in time as human records go back.

Conflict: Those who believe via the evidence suggested by actual observation are in conflict with those who state that those observations are faulty and do not represent what they would appear to because the reality that they propose is theoretically impossible. 

Discussion: The truth or otherwise of a number of other paranormal or pseudoscientific phenomena, as well as the above examples, cannot be decided either by theory or by observation. Experimental evidence is all too often impossible to come by. If something cannot be, and yet apparently is, then yet again, something’s screwy somewhere. Perhaps this is all a case of ETI having a bit of personal fun at the expense of ‘his’ virtual creations.

THE AFTERLIFE: A concept that closest to the hearts and minds of nearly all humans and human cultures past and present is what happens to us after we kick the bucket? The answer is we transcend into another life – an afterlife.

Theory: Every culture, past and present, has an afterlife concept, a life after death concept, or some sort of an eternity or immortality worldview.

Observation: None. Nobody has ever come back from the dead to prove the reality of an afterlife to the satisfaction of any unbiased referee.

Conflict: Not all of the versions of the theoretical afterlife can be correct, unless there is a multi-path virtual reality. Apart from that, idealistic theoretical expectations that when you die you won’t stay dead versus practical reality that observations show that dead things stay dead, are indeed conflicting.

Discussion: If ETI has a ‘living’ software program with you in it, then ETI may have various ‘afterlife’ programs that kicks in after you die virtually..

CONCLUSIONS: All up, perhaps some cosmic ETI computer programmer/software writer whiz with a wicked sense of humour (a trickster ‘god’?) is laughing its pointed ears off since we haven’t been able to figure it (our virtual reality) out. Of course maybe the minute we do, the fun’s over and ‘Dr. It’ hits the delete key and that’s the way the Universe ends – not with a pressure-cooker Big Crunch, nor with a Heat Death (the Big Freeze), not even a Big Rip, but with that “are you sure you want to delete this?” message! “Yes”.