Phi for All

Would you describe the time between "two" and "three" as nothingness from your perspective?

No, I think this type of visualization is BAD. How is this different than saying that a particular group is lazy, or dishonest? Why do you think all aged people are regressing? Viewing people this way is almost guaranteed to taint your judgement. You should think about getting a thinner brush to paint with. The one you're using causes you to make assumptions and generalize, which historically has not worked AT ALL for you. And after all the times it's been mentioned, it's something you still refuse to take on board. It seems to be a blind spot for you.

You've never been under general anesthesia, I take it. The time between when you go fully under until the loss of consciousness is reversed is as close to being dead as you'll experience. You remember being asked to count backwards, and the next point of consciousness is hours later, with no sense that the time has passed. For you, at that time, nothing happened, you experienced nothingness.

My observations in the desert show that I can hold shade in my bowl only when it's upside down. When I turn the bowl right side up, all the shade evaporates. Shade must be anti-light. Very logical. This is different than when I try to fill the bowl with fire or lightning, which I fail at every time.

Is it logical to treat properties of an object the same as the object itself? The ability to combust at around 300C marks a difference between wood and rock, such that if we add that much heat and enough oxygen, the wood will burn but the rock won't. We can change the conditions and the properties change as well; add more heat and the rock will burn, or add water and the wood won't. It seems like a hole is a conditional property of an object. Its value relies completely on the value of the object to define itself. Also, if I dig a hole in the ground, but then fill it back in with the same dirt, there's no hole, but if I dig the hole and fill it back in with concrete, does the hole in the ground still exist (or is that just semantics)? If I dig the hole and it fills up with water, is it a hole or a puddle? What is it if I fill it in with pudding? As swansont mentioned, if a bowl is buried in the sand, filled but not serving its intended purpose, it's still a bowl. But if I'm trying to cross the desert and I find the bowl, and change the conditional properties of the hole by using the bowl to shade my head from the brutal heat, does the bowl become a hat?

You have to use the definition of nothingness that means "absence of existence" to get close to a non-human concept. And even then I can imagine it. We interact with it as an opposite to everything we have that we deem important. And death, a biological death for a specific creature certainly approaches the concept of nothingness. When I die, it will be all I have, which won't make a bit of difference to me.

I think "the ideas that we deal with" are automatically human concepts. I don't even see how "nothingness" is a non-human concept. What is a non-human concept? Is it something that we just don't do, that other creatures/things do, but we just know about? Are you talking about something like the concept of "never moving under your own force", like a rock? Or the concept of asexual reproduction that a sea star undergoes?

Nothing good ever follows this phrase. Sort of like, "Now hear me out". What, the statement of mine you hacked up in order to agree with it?! MY point in that sentence, the part you chose to censor, was that the concept is tainted. It makes assumptions that poison the well regarding "the box". It's mis-informative foundationally. Again, this is just stuff that makes sense to you, things you've made up because they seem "logical". You have no evidence, for example, that any physicist behaves the way you claim. You just assume there are some that do, out of all those people. And even if a few did, guess what? Science is a meritocracy, so it's very difficult to stop new ideas if they're sound. You're making this out to be a large problem, when I think it's mostly made up by people who don't know how science or scientists work. The whole honesty bit is a big red herring, imo, since it applies equally to everyone, so I'd prefer not to go there. IOW, science evolves with new knowledge. I knew that.

Collaborative multidisciplinary problem solving isn't "thinking outside the box" to me. It's seems more like an example of the extremely high degree of cooperation and communication humans have evolved to use. And normally in those situations, it seems like the probability of a non-expert coming up with a solution to a particular problem are going to be only slightly higher than random guesswork. The experts, however, have a much broader range of knowledge and therefore have a higher probability of being successful. There's something tainted about "the box" concept as it's used popularly. It automatically implies rigid, intractable, unchanging adherence to past knowledge, and many people use it to imply outside-the-box thinking is the only way to progress. They talk about it like "the box" never changes, that it's hidebound, it plugs its ears to new ideas. This isn't at all what the original puzzle was supposed to show. In the original "box", the box is quite necessary, and for some things, you need to include some parts that are outside as well as inside. Because let's face it, most out-of-the-box solutions are like 1 part out, 9 parts in.

Never would? Really? That's an extraordinary claim I'd like to see some evidential support for. I think this is one of those "modern logic" examples, where you state something as fact just because it makes sense to you that it would be that way. It seems like it might happen this way, so that's the way it is. Poor reasoning, and not logic.

Good idea. [/off-topic rants]

I've made my off-topic thoughts known on outside-the-box thinking recently in another thread. I'll let others chime in on what it means to them. I'll just start us off with this: the original reference, from what I can tell, was to an actual BOX, the 9-dot "box" puzzle where you're supposed to connect all the dots with just 4 straight lines, without lifting up your pencil (Sam Loyd's Cyclopedia of 5000 Tricks, Puzzles, and Conundrums, 1914). The only way to solve it is to draw your lines past the perimeter of dots, or "outside the box". It's a misdirection trick, we're fooled because we're thinking of the rules for normal connect-the-dots, but it makes us believe we didn't think hard enough because it seems so simple. Business practices in the 60s picked up on this, encouraging people to think creatively. Since then, it's also come to symbolize how structure and organization stifle free thought. "The Box" is established knowledge, and it's implied that nobody who thinks "inside" can possibly think "outside". And, somehow, it's implied that you'll be especially good at thinking outside "The Box" if you stay away from what's inside entirely. This seems like another phrase that's been misinterpreted and then misapplied. What's your perspective on thinking outside the box?

I did the bolding, but I think that's the question. We have Planck units, but I'm not sure if you're asking about measurements, or if you're looking for the smallest definable "particle" everything else is made up of. String Theory proposes that all is made up of vibrating, one-dimensional "strings" instead of particles, but unless "last I checked" was in the mid-90s, you've probably heard of that concept.

Could be the lack of sleep, but your "perfect understanding" is wrong. That's not how I want to define anyone who claims to think outside the box. I quite clearly said that it takes someone with quite a bit of knowledge ABOUT the box to think outside it. And as imatfaal mentions, TOtB is not as readily applicable in science as it is in fields where creativity is needed for problem-solving.

We ARE funny. We're like Smokey the Bear trying to stamp out forest fires before they get out of hand. We're stamping hard on you because you've shown a different side than most speculators, a willingness to learn. Your mistakes in your alternative hypothesis were easy to correct. This, however, is not a simple correction. This concept of "thinking outside the box" is not a school kid getting a bad mark, it's more like that school kid is walking to school and decides to take the route through the dark tunnel that leads into the endless forest. The path to The Dark Side. The perception that you can somehow magically think of something that a professional has overlooked is REALLY appealing. As swansont mentions, it means you're unburdened by the restrictions of current understanding. You feel like you don't need to learn as much as anyone else, because you're special and can use your unburdened thoughts to reach conclusions people who've studied MUCH more than you could never reach. I recommend you re-read what imatfaal said last as well. I want to make that post a sticky, because it highlights so many of the misconceptions related to "the box".

Making mistakes isn't really what I'd call part of Murphy's Law (the aphorism). It might be a subset, but I think it would be slightly intellectually dishonest to make an honest mistake but then chalk it up to Murphy. That seems like the opposite of a learning experience. I invoke the Murph when things conspire to go pear-shaped at the same time. One bad thing is hardly a Murphy incident, but when you drop your phone in the dog's water bowl and slip in the huge mess it made and break your arm, the series is usually what makes me think of Murphy. And of course, it's all just confirmation bias. Minor bad things happen all the time, and sometimes we group some under a pattern we claim is governed by that bastard Murphy.

Is the original subject all talked out now?

People say this, but it's pretty irrational, actually. It doesn't work this way at all. You need to know what's inside the box before you could successfully think outside it, right? Right? What you're saying by using this phrase is that you make guesses about things you don't know much about. It takes a true expert in the field to think outside the box, but our culture has mistakenly made it seem like anyone who can think can do it.

Way to be reasonable instead of ignoring them so we could make guesses based on those errors.

! Moderator Note This is Speculations. We need a way to move beyond maybes and guesswork and flawed assumptions. And please stop using assertive phrases like "...if used frequently indicate a nervous disposition with an urge to travel" without automatically providing supportive evidence. It's an extraordinary claim and you should know by now that it will be required. More rigor, please.

I was really just talking about the video program title (Is Gravity an Illusion?). I can't believe I missed the one in the title of your thread. I can fix that if you like. The vast majority (I usually mean 75%+ when I use the term) of people who come here with speculative ideas that contradict mainstream science are adamant about their claims. They start threads like this, BUT, they make assertions, they state that this is really the way things are. You didn't do that. You explained your thought process, you posed some conditions, you asked questions, you sought advice. You get a whole different experience here when you do that, I've noticed. People stop just demanding you provide evidence for your assertions, and they work to help get you out of the soup instead. Thanks for being open to the rigors of scientific criticism.

Stop listening to music that has lyrics while you study. Your mind can't stop itself from recognizing patterns, and it will sing along to lyrics it has stored. Instrumental music (I prefer classical) still has patterns your mind will latch onto, but for me they're easier to ignore than word patterns when I'm trying to focus on work or study. Short breaks for 3-5 minutes every 45 minutes is a good way to break up the details of the work you're doing. I recall reading a study that showed productivity on a project starts to decrease after focusing on it solely for an hour. Without those breaks, you aren't being as efficient with your focus even though you "keep at it" for hours on end. I have no evidence right at hand to back this up (strictly a this-makes-sense-to-me argument, so feel free to dismiss it), but I think snacking takes up chemical resources in the body that you could use for study. If you aren't particularly hungry, I would avoid eating while studying (again, I could be completely wrong, there may be studies that show different results). I guess I base this on the extreme case, where we eat so much that we start to feel sleepy because the body needs the resources to digest all that food. Don't divert your bodies resources.

What imatfaal said, but also know that if, if, IF, your arguments were able to persuade due to evidence that passes our loose (compared to professional) peer review, and you were able to answer any objections and deal with the details of making a sound case, IF your idea gets to that level where no more picking it apart is reasonable, where you have much to support it and nothing that refutes it, then we start looking at it as an explanation we can trust more, and we can talk about it from a mainstream perspective. The idea behind Speculations has always been that if your idea has true merit, it will be able to pull itself out of conjecture and into accepted science. It's not easy; it's not supposed to be.

You completely missed the question mark at the end. If you'd seen that, you'd have known to invoke Betteridge's Law.

I agree completely. If trying to kill something makes it grow, maybe feeding that something will have the opposite effect. We should try it.