You'll notice your arguments for a whole require incredible verbosity compared to the arguments for reality in parts.
Likewise, your arguments for 'reality in whole' are wholly unconvincing. Not to particularly pick on you, but I have to reject it outright (then again, I subscribe to the "materialist paradigm"). Many of them are simply misunderstandings of the science involved.
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To prove how separate you really are from everything around you, stop eating food. See how "separate" you really are. If you want even faster verification, stop breathing the air. Oh .. you're not so separate as you thought!
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This belies interdependence, not 'wholeness', for me. Certainly we are connected via ecosystems (food pyramid?) but that does not mean we are a unified organism; our diet is an apt example of this - we can easily replace foods with other foods and not suffer any ill effects. Even a properly prepared 'stew' of essential acids and vitamins would be sufficient to keep us in proper health.
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The fundamental particles that make up matter are not actually different, they only appear different. They are all the same vibrating string in 11 dimensions. The different particles are simply different vibrational modes of that self-same string.
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Is this an attempt at string theory? From my vantage point, that doesn't describe the situation accurately at all.
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The fundamental particles that make up matter are not actually different. They are all symmetries of an exceptional simple Lie group called E8. This gives rise to their apparent difference. The self-same particle is merely rotating through spacetime on a different axis-of-symmetry.
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And this? What's the origin here?
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The differences we perceive are created through the act of perception itself. The dividing lines between these things we call "objects" are arbitrary distinctions. What motivates our brains to create these divisions is a necessity in ancestors to propagate their genetic material to offspring. This necessity is not written into reality itself, but is created a posteriori by those ancestors who happened to have reproduced. (I.e. the accidental success at reproduction later created the so-called "necessity").
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This is the best argument so far, for me. Certainly, we create divisions and boundaries exist, primarily because of the way our cognitive abilities are subdivided into discrete calculations. I'm not sure an easy rebuttal for this argument exists. There is no denying the 'schema' model of our brain; things are organized by their constituent properties and divided into groups by any number of characteristics, arbitrary or not. Separating ourselves from our own perception of the world is nigh impossible. If this claim is true, I have a hard time being interested in it because it's simply untestable. And as an adherent of the "materialist paradigm", that makes it largely useless. In short, if it's true, we'll never know and so I have a hard time caring.
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The arbitrary divisions in reality created above are projected onto the outside world, not the other way around. The first projection of "difference" came when early bacteria differentiated food from its own waste matter. This distinction, as "real" as it seems, is not contained in physics per se.
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I'm not sure here. I don't see how bacterial food selection is not 'contained in physics per se' ?
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Physicists at CERN believe the four fundamental forces of nature are all actually a single Master Force. It appears in different guises only because something called spontaneous symmetry-breaking takes place at lower temperatures. By "lower temperatures" we mean energy is not as hot as the universe was in the first second after the Big Bang.
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I'm not sure this is accurate either. CERN is looking for (among other things) the Higgs-Boson, and I haven't seen any reputable scientist advance that this is self-same with another particle or force at different temperature/pressure.
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Energy is neither created nor destroyed, but only changes form. The total energy of the universe, then, must be some constant exact number. Different 'stuff' is not different, it is the Same "Stuff/Thing" in different guises.
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Second best argument. I think conservation of energy is a solid case for 'wholeness', at least given a near-infinite timeline. As my hero was fond of saying, "We are stardust." We are indeed, on a long timescale, made of particles that originated with the creation of the universe, galaxy, and ultimately planet. The molecules which formed our first DNA (from which all the rest of us is synthesized) originates with our parents, which originated with their parents, etc. The only limitation is timescale, so it's again a difficult proposition. Arguing that we're "whole" on an infinite timeline is not terribly meaningful to me, considering the discrete (and short on celestial timescales) lifetime of the average human.
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From thermodynamics. A system that has reached equilibrium cannot be used to tell time. This suggests that time is not an aspect of physics. Time is not inherent in nature, but instead is a byproduct of relationships of the "Energy Stuff/Thing" (see above) as it coordinates itself in space.
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True, time is not a fundamental force, and a simple measurement of seconds elapsed from a human perspective. Our perception of time could be (and likely would be) dramatically different than the perception of time by any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial race. I'm not sure that indicates we're "whole" in any sense, only that having memories requires a non-arbitrary scale of elapsed time to give them meaning.
Read more:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/newrepl...#ixzz17WwK40Lw