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Cultures are a consensus. Many cultures have a regard for conquest and expansion. A nomadic culture is also a consensus which adapts its members to their circumstances. Home could be a tribe in constant motion. One of the points I tried to make is that home is the consensus in which an individual was raised, not a spot on a map, but an agreement on a particular set of expectations held in common.

Yes, the branches are at odds, and it is an uncomfortable situation, is it not? But, does not the consensus persist? Is it not a consensual expectation that tells us the Executive and Judicial branches are behaving inappropiatly? Cultures do evolve, usually by learning from wrong turnings. I think Art is not the machinery of society. I consider it more of a cultural activity. Yes, I meant exactly that. Collective action requires consensus,. Consensus requires language. All of these require intelligence, but the power for us tool users comes from collective action. I consider Science and Law collective actions, perhaps our most powerful ones. As to your last point, I agree. But is not someone exposed to a novel truth forever changed by it, regardless of circumstances Well, there's the old saying: There's no place like home. Also, I've tried it. But there are no doubt exceptions. So, I commited a generality. I thank you for the complement of rational opposition.

One of the paradoxes of human nature is that while people crave and enjoy the novelty of the foreign, the alien, they would rather not live immersed in novelty. However interesting a strange culture is in the short term, in the long term, one’s own culture is a more predictable and understood environment, one comfortable enough to work, rest, and raise children in. When we encounter each other, given the context and nature of the encounter, we need a general understanding of the likely reactions, of the social conventions governing the encounter, and of the expectations which apply. We need this understanding to be like programming, fast, automatic and effortless, so that we can relate freely each day, living our lives amid familiarity. Day to day, we need a recovery kind of environment, the predictability, the comfort of people around us who look at things in a similar way, and who generally react in ways that are understandable. We like nested spheres of familiarity around us: family, city, state, nation, with One’s self, secure at the center. And we need those familiar, nested institutions, to reflect, what is to us, a reasonable world view, in their rules and in their functioning. We also need the ideas embodied in our institutions to agree. Disagreement between institutions would be uncomfortable. We would be forced to deal with conflict, and resolve it somehow. But there is little conflict or contradiction left among our institutions here in America, or in other mature cultures. In a mature culture, the institutions have adapted to each other. And if they do not necessarily embody pure truth, they do work well together. They cooperate, and they keep their stories straight. What we must realize about cultures and the institutions they evolve, is that while they do contain selected truths, they are not primarily bodies of truth; they are bodies of agreement. Cultures are essentially the consensus of a group of people about many diverse topics, but they are a Human consensus, not a Scientific one. Culture develops as the evolutionary result of a huge number of individual encounters. As it evolves, it develops expectations and traditions which incrementally improve interactions to become more productive and more satisfying. This enables people more easily to work together, and to enjoy each other while working. Over time, culture adapts, as opinions adapt. People adapt to change, and so their consensus also adapts. But, once formed, it is very difficult to change opinions. It takes time for one person to change an opinion, and it takes even more time for a change in opinion to propagate through a group of people. Opinion has great inertia, so the current consensus of opinion, the current culture, always lags behind the set of conditions it faces. The target is always ahead of the point of aim. Culture is a rolling agreement, an adapting expectation for Human behavior. It has many other aspects to it’s people, since it is a consensus, and a consensus can address many disparate things: myths, aspirations, dreams and a particular interpretation of history. Culture is also a consensus on the way a group of people regard themselves, just as each individual regards him or herself. It is a story, a group story, which, like an individual’s life story, is a recounting of events in terms of their human meaning. And like an individual’s story, a culture’s story has been edited. The dictionary definition of culture is “The shape or form of a civilization.” This description says nothing about the function of culture. A more pertinent definition of culture, describing its function would be: The culture of a group of people, is that consensus which enables and promotes their collective action. But as people develop a culture, they also develop a society. Primogeniture is moot. Culture and society evolve together. They are two aspects of the same activity, namely, collective action. Culture is an agreement on intangibles, a point of view, a take on things. It consists of attitudes and generalities held in common, and as all generalities must be, culture is an abstraction, or rather, a collection of abstractions. Society is concerned with the concrete, not the abstract. Society is a practical arrangement; who does what, and when they should do it. It is a system of specializations and working relationships. It is a chain of command, a set of incentives and sanctions. It is a political system and an economic system. All of these are elucidated in its body of law. Society is the machinery of collective action. Culture is the design philosophy of that machinery, its guidance and its inspiration. Culture is abstract and general. Society is concrete and particular. Culture is theory, society is practice. In this essay, I will address only culture. I will discuss not the machinery of collective action, but the culture informing that machinery. A given culture, and its society, are the end result of the prolonged trial and error of multitudes, and the inspiration of a few. Culture is the raison d’etre for human intelligence. It enables collective action, which, in all its power for good or ill, has given Humanity dominance over this planet. But, powerful as cultures are, they have flaws. The way a culture views resources, is skewed, by which resources happen to be abundant, and which happen to be scarce. A culture’s particular profile of abundance shifts what it values and hence, it’s world view. Also, because of the seamless nature of its world view, there are doors of opportunity a culture may not open. It does not see them because its world view looks in other directions. The culture which a particular people have evolved, and are immersed in, is a kind of comfortable tautology, free of contradictions, since its viewpoint, institutions, and expectations all agree with each other. Perhaps it is a kind of circular boredom that gives an alien artifact its appeal. An alien artifact is interesting because it discloses novel possibilities. Possibilities which one culture missed, but another culture, did not miss. In genetics, hybrid vitality appears in the cross breeding of two isolated gene pools. When two gene pools of the same species are isolated from each other, each has, by Darwinian adaptation, weeded out its own set of unfavorable genes and reinforced its own set of favorable genes. Cross breeding between these isolated gene pools results in individuals who have drawn upon a larger pool of favorable genes, from which more unfavorable genes have been eliminated. The benefit of cross breeding isolated gene pools is called Hybrid Vitality. Different cultures have different priorities and perspectives, but the evolution of a culture, in the formation of its institutions, weeds out bad ideas, and reinforces good ones. Ideas in an isolated culture are thus analogous to genes in an isolated gene pool. Both are improved informational products of the evolutionary process. In a culture, institutions embodying its successful ideas prevail. In a gene pool, individuals embodying its successful genes prevail. History has shown Civilization's seminal progress when isolated cultures merge. In both genetic and cultural encounters, new strengths and new structures emerge. Lesser truths, both genetic and ideological, are subsumed in a fusion which produces a stronger people, possessed of a greater truth. In the 21st century Humanity is changing, profoundly. The historic isolation of gene pools and cultures is coming to its end. A broader fusion has begun and will not stop. A global culture is evolving, a layer of universal commonality, of consensus, limited in scope, but global in scale, destined to guide Humanity at large. The ideas labeled as: International Law, Human Rights, Self-government, and Rogue State, all express consensual expectations, but these expectations are not the consensus of any single culture, nor of any single nation. They are expectations reaching for, and winning, the consensus of the Human Race. The genesis of global culture, and global society, are changes of a type and a magnitude, never before encountered by Humanity. But, viewed as problems, they are not beyond the power of our species, not beyond the power of seven billion of us, parallel processors communicating at the speed of light. Our descendants will see the management of the ecology, of global resources and population, regarded consensually by all of Humanity, and when that consensus finally does exist, there will be action, collective action, on a planetary scale. Every sane Human, loves this world. And if it’s many cultures have created the power to damage it, one culture, one sane, global, human culture, will have the power to heal it.

TIME By John K Daly Why is the future not knowable in the way the past is knowable? Why does time seem to flow in one direction? Why is there an arrow of time? What is time? These seem like difficult questions, but they are not. There is a simple path to an accurate understanding of their answers. To begin to understand these questions, consider the expansion of an inflating balloon. Its surface is expanding such that if you pick any point on the balloon, every other point on the balloon recedes from the point you picked. If you think about how this works everywhere on the balloon, you realize that what is really happening is that new area is flowing in the balloon's surface as it expands. At every single point on the balloon's two dimensional surface, new length and new width are appearing, and spreading in all directions. Area is two dimensional and space-time is four dimensional, but the same kind of thing is happening in our Universe, and by Universe, I mean the visible portion of the universe we inhabit, not the totality, which may be infinite. The Universe we can see, (which I will designate with a capital U) is expanding. The mass the Universe contains is composed of matter and energy. They are inter-convertible (e=mc squared) and both have mass. The mass the Universe contains is not increasing. Since the Big Bang, the mass has been constant. It is a lot cooler now than the incredibly hot Quark-Gluon mix it started as. It cooled to become mostly hydrogen and then fused to heavier elements in stars and captured neutrons etc. to become the large array of elements we see today, but it's all still the original mass we started with, just a lot cooler, and a lot more complex. The original simple Quark-Gluon mix has developed to become the diversity of all the elements in the periodic table. The Universe has been expanding for 13.8 billion years. It expands this second, at a rate which is still homogeneous everywhere in the Universe. The space-time that contains this mass is growing ever larger, but no new mass is appearing. Only new space-time is appearing. Space-time is not at all material, no more than up and down, or left and right are material. It is a set of 4 continuous dimensions, 4 directional axes if you will, left/right, up/down, forward/backward, future/past; all continuous and at right angles to each other. Continuous interchangeable dimensions at right angles to each other are called a continuum because they are the same. The only difference is the way we are pointed. If we turn 90 degrees, the front/rear dimension becomes the left/right dimension. The three dimensions of space are only arbitrarily designated. In actuality, all four dimensions are the same, but we do not perceive time as a space dimension. Einstein has proved it to be a dimension of the same continuum, and many experiments have confirmed this. But our perceptions see time as a flow. Because all of its parts grow at the same rate, second by second, the Universe is flat. The space-time expansion rate has changed, in fact, it was explosively larger in the beginning, but what ever that rate happens to be at any particular second, it is identical across the Universe, and the Universe stays flat. It expands uniformly. Consider, that, most importantly, not just space is flowing in the expansion. Time is flowing also. New space and time flow in our Universe just like new width and length flow in the balloon's surface. We understand the creation of new space in an expanding Universe. The Universe is getting bigger, adding space, growing outward from every point. But the creation of new time, we experience personally. New time flows everywhere as it appears in the expansion of space-time, but living things perceive this flow directly, as the passage of time. Only our instruments can detect the flow of space. The difficulty of understanding Cosmology is not the science, but how we perceive time. In the expansion, in the passage of additional time, change becomes possible. If time did not increase in the Universe, nothing in the Universe could change. Time's expansion ages the Universe, equally, everywhere. The expansion of time which has not yet taken place is the future. Think about it. The flow of space must also be the flow of time, because if time did not flow, there could be no change. Without the flow of time, the Universe could not have expanded or changed in any way. It could not even have originated. Without the flow of time, there is no flow of space. They are and must be, a continuum. Some Cosmologist believe that time has no boundaries, and flowed before the Big Bang. And yes, the rate of expansion of space with respect to time has varied, but the question of time's origin is moot for this essay, which stands or falls, whether time preexisted the Big Bang or not, because the origin of time makes no difference to its flow, or to our subjective experience of its flow. Space-time expansion does not, and has not changed the size of bound structures. The structure of an individual atom is due to its component particles and the Strong, Weak, and Electromagnetic forces. The space the atom occupies, continually expands and flows outward, but the atom's structure, its particles and the forces which hold the particles in place, that structure does not change. Expansion does not change the size or mass of individual atoms. The same is true of other larger structures composed of atoms, which are bound by Chemical, Electromagnetic or Gravitational forces. Gases, dust, asteroids, planets, suns, galaxies, galaxy clusters, none of them are changed in size by the expansion of space-time. The space they are embedded in expands and flows frictionlessly past and through them as it expands, leaving them intact, but ever increasing the distance between bound clumps of matter. Space and time, no matter how differently we perceive them, are like length and width, a set of dimensions in a continuum. But the space-time continuum encloses our entire Universe. It is the continuum whose growth, whose endless supply, directed by the laws of our Universe, has developed the original matter of our Universe from the beginning. The continuous supply of space-time has allowed change and development of that matter. It has allowed it to produce life, evolution, and even thought. The flow of space-time is not a remote, esoteric abstraction. In summary: The Universe has been shaped by its own laws from the beginning. These laws, which also originated in the Big Bang, developed the original mass from a uniform hot mixture to an extensive and diverse array of elements. They developed that diverse array of elements to a diverse array of life, and then developed that diverse array of life to a diverse array of intelligence. Eons of complex, multistage development, and growing diversity, were made possible through one process, the process which formed our Universe, the process which developed it: The expansion of the space-time continuum.

From this site: The first is most familiar to us, extrinsic curvature. It arises whenever we have a surface that curves into a higher dimension. We have seen many examples. One of the simplest arises when a flat sheet of paper is bent or rolled up into a cylinder. A more interesting case arises when the surface is dome-like, such as a hemisphere. In this last case of the hemisphere, the curvature of the surface into the higher dimension is associated with a failure of ordinary Euclidean geometry in the surface of the sphere. This failure of Euclidean geometry arises fully within the surface; it is a manifestation ofintrinsic curvature. To summarize:

There is a very lucid discussion of this issues here: http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/non_Euclid_variable/index.html It states what I have been maintaining. That both intrinsic and extrinsic curvature require a higher dimension to accommodate that curvature.

Yes, Shannon's formula. Thank you, enjoyed your input!

There is quite a bit on the web about a Scale dimension, including its mathematical statement. Another suggested dimension is the Information Dimension, which is the freedom of matter to move on the Information/Entropy axis (not a geometric degree of freedom). When dead matter is consumed by a living thing (say water) which takes it into itself and organizes it, it moves that matter in the Information Direction when it becomes part of a life. When the life that does the organizing ends, the matter moves to a lower organization state i.e. the organization of the life decays, its matter moves in the entropic direction, as it acquires many more possible states. The equations for entropy and information can be put in the same form, except for the sign. Are you interested in Information Theory or Thermodynamics?

I meant spaces mapped to spherical surfaces, or even circles and diameters inscribed on spheres. But never mind. I have read that some physicists propose that scale is a dimension, representing another degree of freedom for geometric objects. Perhaps dimensions are not so easy to recognise. Thanks, I will look up the geometries you suggest.

Does this mean that everything describable in topology can exist in this Universe? Mathematical describability is not equivalent to reality. It is perhaps a necessary condition, but in itself, is it not insufficient to guarantee existence? In other words, OK, you can imagine and define such a spiral, but can it exist in the real world? Let me rephrase my question: In the case we are discussing (the curvature of spacetime by the presence of mass) is the consensus of scientific opinion that this curvature does not require mapping to an additional dimension? If so, then why is it intrinsic? Would not the value of pi be reduced if a black hole were approached?

I never meant to imply that the mass/energy of the Universe was altered by the expansion, either 3D or 4D (if 4D expansion exists). I was taught mass/energy is a constant, including dark mass/energy. So, I agree time does not alter mass, mass is conserved. What has changed is the position in spacetime being observed between time stamp T1 and time stamp T2. If the object is a rock, is it not a rock at any time stamp observed between T1 and T2? And by observed, I mean its mass is observed as well. I certainly don't mean that every possible mass observed is conserved. That mass would be infinite, no? But I apologize for confusing language referring to the physical continuity of mass's extension into the past. I never meant that the mass of an object per se is continually increasing. Nor that a physical link to the past persists. I should have said the identity of the rock extends into the past, or its world line. I apologise for confusing and inexact language. But let me define my view of the passage of time between T1 and T2. Case 1: Call it Exterior Time, let Case 1 be the prevailing consensus view of time as I understand it, i.e. time pre-existing the Universe (a tautology IMHO), allowing the expansion to reverse etc. Case 2: Call it Interior Time (what I believe), meaning time is an artifact of expansion, and limited to the Universe. The object in both cases has moved in time, either Interior Time or Exterior Time. There would be no difference. There would be no difference with respect to mass, there would be no difference with respect to position. No difference with respect to any time stamp between T1 and T2. The cases are identical, objectively and subjectively for the observer. In both cases, time is the 4th Dimension. The only difference is the pre-existence of the time dimension. But, perhaps I am wrong, and the pre-existence of time is not a tautology. I think ideas outside the mainstream should be examined if they are logically consistent, even if it means temporarily accepting disagreeable postulates.

Ah, I see what you mean. A physical property like mass or charge. Volume is a metric, space is not a metric, I agree with you, but space can be measured by a metric. And that metric can increase, and that means that the property measured by the metric can increase, no? Anyway that is what I meant by "space is accumulating". Forgive my short cut, but total semantic rigor causes people to lose track of the essential ideas very quickly. I suppose I could have written "the volume of space is accumulating". Space is after all, a set of directions. But I don't see how the volume of the Universe could increase unless space were expanding. Anyway, you described space as a volume above. Time is not a property or a metric, it is a dimension. The second is the metric of time yes, specifying rate or duration. If my writing must be rigorous, yours should be too, no? But I take your meaning of the above quite clearly. And yes, I agree.

OK, but is not volume a substance property? Can you expand space without accumulating volume? I agree the words are semantically distinct.

Space is not a force either, but our universe is accumulating it. And can you show me a contracting Universe? The tilt is just a (valid) graphical representation of frames moving with respect to each other. Such a graphical representation also shows what you call "time compression" due to relative motion, and Lorentz contraction as relative projections between frames. Some people think mathematically, others are good at rotating spaces. I did not invent these diagrams. They are scattered throughout the literature along with the math.

When an observer A from his frame sees observer B acquire velocity, B's frame tilts, rotating spaceward as seen by A. B's time axis moves into what A sees as space. It is a continuum, space and time are interchangeable dimensions. At the event horizon of a black hole, an external observer is seeing time rotated 90 degrees as space. Space and time are interchangeable dimensions. But we perceive in three dimensions. What we perceive is a changing 3 dimensional cross section of a 4 dimensional continuum. It changes because time is expanding in the Universe (I believe) as well as space. The Universe accumulates both because (I believe) it is expanding in 4 directions, not three. Whether time pre-existed is moot. Either way, the Universe is accumulating seconds as it ages, and the process of accumulation appears to our senses as I have described. To wit: a changing 3D cross section of the 4 dimensional continuum, which changes because time is expanding and the seconds flow, or if you believe time preexisted and the expansion is 3D only, time is accumulating because seconds have always flowed.

Note: there is an important consequence of my "opinion". Because we change coordinate in time it means that we don't continue to "exist" somewhere in the past. That is because we cannot be alltogether in the present and in the past. As you stated before, we are 3dimensional beings, we are not extruded in the past. Michel, You are saying that accumulated space persists, but not accumulated time? The mass we are composed of has existed in one form or other since the BB. How then could it not extend into the past? If matter that existed in the past still exists, well, is it not "extruded in the past"? And yes, my thesis is that time flow is not metaphysical, anymore than the flow of space due to the expansion. We know time's expansion flow as a changing 3D cross section, because 4D flow is not perceivable to beings who perceive only 3 dimensions. Matter has not expanded with spacetime, because it is bound by atomic, chemical, and gravitational forces. Spacetime just expands, flowing without friction, even in the very interior of a neutron star. Every form of mass in the continuum is 4 dimensional. When I say we are three dimensional beings, I am referring to the way we experience the Universe with our senses, we are conscious of a changing 3D cross section of the time dimension. That is what I am saying. You are saying we are discrete beings travelling through the continuum. Alfred North Whitehead said (in many words) that the Universe is continually coming into being. Our sensory experience will never distinguish between these, only our minds.

A circle is a line mapped to a cylinder. A cylinder is not one dimensional. But I don't know much topology, I may be missing something. What do you mean by "local chart definition"?

Well, the explanation I propose suggests why the past is knowable but the future is not. The future is expansion that has not taken place yet. We experience only the frontier of time, not the past except through the present, though we are physically continuous with ourselves in the past; at least that is what I believe since I remember no temporal gaps in my physical existence. We experience only the frame we live in, as it moves in the continuum. I see what you are suggesting about movement through the continuum, but I don't see the future as fixed. Alfred North Whitehead in his book "Process and Reality" proposed that the universe was continually coming into existence. In other words, that the past and present are real, but the future not yet real. Any of these explanations allows, as I think your explanation must, that living things are able to change the continuum. Perhaps the only differences are semantic. We have very little in the way of physical referents for the concepts with which we address these issues. Perhaps the only scientific paper I know of, that directly addresses the nature of consciousness was written by Roger Penrose and an Anesthesiologist named Hameroff. They proposed that the tubule structures in neurons contain many quantum wells whose contents were wave function linked as well as physically linked. The physical linkage provided distributed processing that was the precursor to perception. They proposed that this distributed processing (like the game of LIFE), was preconscious until the quantum linked processing of many states, self collapsed (Penrose) to a real perception. The collapse was the instance of perception. Their evidence was the coincidence of the calculated timing of the quantum processes with known brain wave frequencies, plus other things. I read this paper years ago, so forgive any inaccuracies in my summary. No significant work that I know of has been done to test this paper's validity. This is an area where Scientists fear to tread, but it is interesting. I remember asking in Biology how a single celled animal could do as much as it did without a nervous system. If you want to read it, the title is: Orchestrated reduction of quantum coherence in brain microtubules: A model for consciousness

We are three dimensional creatures living in four dimensional spacetime. We can not perceive the 4th dimension except as a three dimensional cross section. What we call time could well be a "space" dimension whose expansion flows in a direction we can not perceive.

The intrinsic designation, applied to curvature, means that the curvature is testable. For instance, a space mapped to a sphere would show a different value of pi than a flat space, which makes the curvature of the spherical space intrinsic. A space mapped to a cylinder would not show a difference in pi, and it thus has extrinsic curvature, but both the sphere and the cylinder require an additional dimension. No question mark this time.

Moontanman, I believe it would tell us the direction in which spacetime is curved. But I take your point. Am I correct that you are saying, that if it is a dimension of space it should be visible to us, and it should be capable of having a metric assigned to it, meters for instance? Could it not be visible in cross section, as the distortion produced by mass induced curvature? Strange, Are you saying the time dimension can be intrinsically curved, or that the continuum can be intrinsically curved? Is the spacetime continuum intrinsically curved by mass? Is that what you are saying Strange? Anyone else know?

It was not a statement, it was a question. Thank you for your responses. But please Chikis, show me how a circle can exist without two dimensions of space. Its line has one dimension surely, but its curvature defines a plane, no? Again, a question. So, if I think what you are saying is that my suggested requirement for a higher space dimension does not apply because the time dimension of the continuum differs from the space dimension. How can this be if continua are homogenous and isotropic? Could not the obvious difference between time and space dimensions be a phenomenon of perception. Again, all questions. I don't know.

I don't believe you should put a scalar like mass on a vector diagram.

All dimensions are at right angles, so time is at right angles to all the space dimensions. Your original diagram is valid. Now if you draw the same diagram for an observer B who is moving with respect to A, B's diagram will be tilted with respect to A. Because of this tilt, an interval in time for A when projected spacewise to B's time axis will subtend a longer length on the time axis. When B looks out spacewise to A's time axis he sees his interval projected on B's time axis subtends a shorter length of time. If you look at the same relationship for the spatial directions, it is apparent that A sees a smaller space interval projected timewise on B's space axis. This is the Lorentz contraction (so called "compression of space"), which shortens the moving body of B in the direction of its motion with respect to A. The higher the relative velocity, the greater the tilt of their frames. Neither A or B are moving in space with respect to themselves, and both are moving in time with respect to themselves. If B starts his journey at A's position, because of the tilt of their frames, you can readily see the distance between A and B increase with increasing time. This sort of geometric way of visualizing relativity has always seemed clear to me. I'm pretty sure it's more right than wrong.

If space-time is itself four dimensional, and in addition it is curved, this means there must be an additional spatial dimension for the curvature to extend into. You can not curve a one dimensional line without a dimension for that curvature to extend into. You can not curve a surface without a dimension for that curvature to extend into. Would not four dimensional space-time, which is curved by the presence of mass, require a fifth dimension to accommodate that curvature's extension?