I quote an old fable: Someone asks a philosopher what the world is like.
\n\u2014The world is one big ball resting on the back of a big turtle.
\n\u2014And what does that big turtle lean on?
\n\u2014On an even bigger turtle.
\n\u2014Well, but… where is the second turtle leaning?
\n\u2014In a bigger one, sir. There’s always an other turtle underneath.<\/p>\n
It’s an idea of the world based on an endless pile of turtles. You can’t say it’s
\na consistent mental model because it’s based on infinity. In this case, an
\ninfinite number of ever-larger turtles.<\/p>\n
When the infinite appears, we’re in trouble.
\nIn the real world nothing exists in infinite quantity. It is a characteristic of
\nmateriality that there is a specific, defined quantity. However, some people
\nbelieve that space could be infinite because it is empty, that it could be
\nconsidered as nothing, and nothing has no quantity.<\/p>\n
Fake. We know that empty space, without matter, still has a certain energy That is why mental models that resort to infinity to sustain themselves have For example, the flat earth model. It has no limits, extends endlessly in all Eratosthenes, a director of the old library in Alexandria, set out to calculate The shadows turned out different. By calculating the curvature needed to Today, in a world of cell phones and the Internet, we couldn’t be fooled with But ideas that are beyond the everyday level are outside of what we call Then a mental model emerges that is obvious to us. All matter in the That’s obvious. What’s the problem? We were taught that they are the building blocks, the smallest possible Well, I regret to inform that such idea is inconsistent. It doesn’t work.<\/p>\n I’m hurrying to explain before it’s too late, with a thought experiment. We place a sheet of A4 paper, for example, and see that the machine cuts it Everything learned about molecules, atoms, electrons, etc., is out of the \u2014Until there’s nothing left \u2014it’s a frequent response.<\/p>\n Good. Using the scientific method, we tentatively accept that answer.<\/p>\n Admitting that there is a precise moment when there is nothing left, it Clearly, we won’t achieve anything by dividing something. So the That’s easy to say. But the universe could come to an end and the machine The idea of a final ball of matter is problematic. It creates paradoxes.<\/p>\n The ancient Greek philosophers realized the paradoxes, so they postulated Today’s science has another answer based on something called fields, such That stops our machine. It can’t cut energy.<\/p>\n The standard model of physics today is field theory, not particle theory. But The current expansion of the universe requires a mysterious force they call To achieve a Theory of Everything, that is to say, a mathematical structure Hawking said: “If we ever come to a theory of everything, it will be nothing It means that we don’t really know what’s behind the laws of physics for These are the big questions. Some are outside the realm of science because The answers are philosophical ideas, religious beliefs, myths and legends.<\/p>\n Implicit in the scientific community is an existential nihilism. These are The great religions sought to avoid this situation by means of precepts given But that picture has changed. The technology of large telescopes and space What’s more, it revealed the size of that universe with billions of galaxies, We currently know that our world is a speck of dust at infinity. That is why I show a paradigm that can be placed between nihilism and They talked about galaxies long before large telescopes and also about the They described a type of matter that does not evolve in time and does not Finally, they said that the universe is a living, conscious entity in very That age-old paradigm is a mental model that has a strange consistency. * * *<\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I quote an old fable: Someone asks a philosopher what the world is like. \u2014The world is one big ball resting on the back of a big turtle. \u2014And what does that big turtle lean on? \u2014On an even bigger turtle. \u2014Well, but… where is the second turtle leaning? \u2014In a bigger one, sir. There’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nthat is called the energy of the void.<\/em> Space is “something,” even though we
\nstill cannot explain what that something means, what its true nature is.<\/p>\n
\nan imaginary foundation. They construct buildings on a mirage.<\/p>\n
\ndirections and uses the problematic infinity as its argument.
\nSome assume that’s what the ancients believed: that the earth was flat. But it
\nreally is an urban myth. The thinkers of other times were not as naive as
\nsome people imagine today. Some of them were really cool.<\/p>\n
\nthe size of the planet. He had two vertical rods placed in two distant cities,
\nSiena and Alexandria, and measured their shadows at noon.<\/p>\n
\ncreate those shadows, he got the full circumference with that curvature.
\nHe obtained a certain number of stadiums, an old measure, equivalent to
\nabout 40,000 km. \u2014nearly 25,000 miles\u2014 Today we know that the equatorial
\ncircumference measures 40,075 km.
\nEratosthenes made that calculation about 200 years before Christ.<\/p>\n
\nunsustainable ideas; at least we think so. Perhaps it is true in everyday life
\nsince current problems and tasks require common sense.<\/p>\n
\ncommon sense. One such idea is that matter is made up of molecules, atoms
\nand various elementary particles such as the electron or proton.<\/p>\n
\nuniverse is made up of particles, except for radio waves, wifi waves, and the
\nlike such as light. But what is palpable, concrete, is made of really small,
\nultra-microscopic canon-balls of matter.<\/p>\n
\nThe problem is in the idea of small canon-ball matter.<\/p>\n
\nscale. The bricks that build the ultimate, final, definitive reality.<\/p>\n
\nSuppose that something supernatural, God or the devil, gave us an infallible
\nmachine to cut matter, no matter how hard or how small it is. If there’s
\nsomething solid, it will cut it in half.<\/p>\n
\ninto two perfect pieces, as it should. We put one of the pieces in its place,
\nwhich is again cut in half.
\nAnd now the million dollar question: How long will that machine be cutting
\nup the paper?<\/p>\n
\nquestion. Only ideas that use our own logic are valid, as the ancient Greek
\nphilosophers did. \u2014How long will that machine be cutting up paper?<\/p>\n
\nfollows that at the previous moment there was still some microscopic piece of paper. Since there was something, the machine cut it and got… two pieces of nothing.<\/p>\n
\nalternative answer would be to continue splitting the paper forever.<\/p>\n
\nwould still keep on cutting for all eternity; cutting for an infinite time. We’re
\ninvoking the famous infinity to justify the answer.<\/p>\n
\nthat there should be an atomon<\/em>, a final indivisible partition. This is precisely
\nwhat Democritus of Abdera postulated, without explaining the cause that
\nprevents the division of the atomon.
\nBecause Democritus didn’t talk about physical details. He was just making a
\nlogical argument. There were no particle accelerators in those days.<\/p>\n
\nas the magnetic field or gravitational field, but defined at the quantum level.
\nAn electron field is defined, for example, that gives rise to electrons. You
\ncould imagine it as an ocean of invisible energy, where there are waves that
\nwould be the electrons. -Although the waves wouldn’t be a very good
\nexample.
\nLet’s say rather that an electron is like a whirlpool of energy in a stable
\nquantum field. It’s concentrated energy, not a ball of matter.<\/p>\n
\nit’s hard to take in, and that’s why we keep talking about particles.
\nThey call it a model agreement because it was an international agreement of
\nthe scientific community. It was the most successful model in the history of
\nscience. It created the technology that changed everyday reality for good.
\nHowever, this consensus model can not explain everything.<\/p>\n
\ndark energy. Galaxies spin as if they have a mass far greater than that
\ndetected by telescopes. Perhaps they have dark matter inside them that
\nproduces a huge gravitational field. We don’t know yet.<\/p>\n
\nthat could support all physical phenomena, was the dream pursued by
\nscientists in the last century. Today, it seems like a very distant goal.<\/p>\n
\nbut equations. What is it that breathes fire into those equations so that a
\nphysical universe emerges from them?”<\/p>\n
\nthem to exist and to work. We don’t really know what life is, or what
\nconsciousness is, or what causes this gigantic and mysterious universe.<\/p>\n
\nthere are no physical resources to address them. They become questions
\nbeyond the physical: they are metaphysical. As the reason for a universe
\nwith living beings, if there are reasons or purposes for their existence.<\/p>\n
\ndifficult words to say that there is no proof that life has any purpose or any
\nobjective meaning, nor is there any proof of the purpose of the universe.
\nWhich is very true: there is no proof. Although that doesn’t prove anything
\neither.
\nFurthermore, if the world is created by blind forces without meaning or
\npurpose, it becomes difficult to maintain values based on subjective,
\nchanging, unpredictable human agreements.<\/p>\n
\nby God himself, according to dogma, to govern human conduct.
\nThis worked pretty well for millennia. If the stars revolved around us day
\nand night, we were the center of creation. Therefore, God was certainly
\naware of us, contemplating and judging our actions.<\/p>\n
\nprobes confirmed, definitively, that we are not the center of any creation nor
\nthe center of the universe.<\/p>\n
\nwhere each one is like an ocean of suns with countless numbers of planets.<\/p>\n
\nAt this time we are coming, I think, to the end of the childhood of reason.<\/p>\n
\ndogmas. A millenary idea of the world maintained for generations through
\nchains of knowledge of instructors and practitioners.<\/p>\n
\nrelative perception of time, as relativistic physics did later.<\/p>\n
\nexist in our world, much like what we now call black holes.<\/p>\n
\ndifferent degrees. A gigantic web of existence on every level.<\/p>\n
\nIt would be worth considering, in addition to the current ones.<\/p>\n