I'm not really sure what your first argument is beyond the hope of a future discovery to affirm a panentheistic view.

I don't pretend to know anything about QM, but I think your second argument resembles a composition fallacy. A physicist could use QM to explain a phenomena, but the phenomena has to exist as more than a nebulous possibility. We should be seeing frequent and repeatable examples of telepathy and telekinesis, for instance, before we should be forced to explain them. Saying that there are complexities at a certain level doesn't demonstrate anything about our experience.

My argument wasn't directed at you, though, if that was your impression. It was mainly inspired by Paisley's asinine view of (anthropocentric) emotions as fundamental components to the cosmos.

This might be where a lot of confusion starts. "Information" in the context of quantum mechanics, is really a branch of probability theory (as I'm sure you're aware). To someone who might not be familiar with information theory, the mistake could easily be made that "information" requires mind. Naturally, it's counter-intuitive to state that communication could possibly happen without mind, and information theory is also about communication. But most of what we could describe as information (for instance, the spin of a specific electron) goes unobserved. Not until it's observed does it become information to us, so someone like Paisley could come to the conclusion that our observation is fundamental to the universe, and our mind is fundamental, since our perception of the fundamental parts of the universe is dependent upon mind. It's the most obscene stretch, just to arrive at the tail wagging the dog.

That's why I get so upset about the use of quantum theory as though it's some kind of magical hammer of debate victory. The issue there is basically measurement. Even on the every day common-sense level, measuring something four or five times, you still have a margin of error. That margin of error comes from the same place that information theory comes from: statistics and probability.

To abuse indeterminacy by stating that it has a serious metaphysical side beyond tongue-in-cheek speculation is to distance yourself from serious work on the problem.

Not to imply that's your position, Eloise. But what IS your position? A sort of natural order by supernatural means?

Yes, I know what you mean there, Will, but I try not to let what I write give any cause to confuse information with human observation.

The biggest mistake I see with this is that people who would do this, conflate it then with the notion of some hoodoo spirit consciousness situated behind their eyes.  That's not reality, as you've noted, the vast majority of quantum information is not classically observed by anyone or anything.

Rhetorically speaking, most healthy people with five full working senses have a tendency to rely heavily on only one of them and filter out the signals that come from others, so then even in the classical sense, the average person's concept of observation is informed by the barest and most misleading of experience. Any notion of measurement or observation is habitually framed in this veiled anthropical assumption and so equated with what that assumption represents to the person, which is our special 'minds'. Quantum observation is about as alien as aural observation to a person who equates their mind almost entirely with their visual experience, the problem is, there can be a lot of distance between a persons concept of mind and one or more of their classical senses. For example, one can be psychologically affected by white noise, probably not noticing that they are hearing it and attribute the headache, instead, to something they were looking at simply because they have no concept of background aural data being related to the state of their mind.

In the basic lack of understanding that 'mind' is not composed merely of one's conscious egotistical thoughts, we have an easily identifiable and distinct gap between the average anthropical concept of mind, and the reality of it. A gap that almost never fails to be projected into woo woo talk about the measurement problem. It is just my opinion, but I think that most people could better understand how quantum observation works if they stepped out of the box of this false equating of mind with a smaller structure composed within mind.

 

I refer to indeterminacy in my post only passingly (ie: "they {electrons} probably do not. {have an objective state of polarisation}), there is some experimental evidence to this statement. And my point in having done so is that objective material ground is an assumption which we need to replace if this sort of result continues.  Statistical material ground is a freakishly messy idea, we can't do science with the new super planet Jupiter-Saturn popping in and out of existence in our equations, there has to be a way for the universe as we have experienced it to be constant in calculation. Assuming an atomic unit of self-measurement is a realistic alternative. It's not a natural order via supernatural means, it's a supra natural order within which natural order has relative constancy.

Sorry for being short about this but I'm on borrowed time right now, as I have important tasks to complete and I can't neglect for long. I just quickly wanted to reply to your correction in my understanding, I'll post something more substantial soon.

 

But we have done that, and suffice it to say we haven't made much progress in that specific area since. This is possibly because no such thing exists.

 

Ahh, yeah OK, no the implications are in the realm of extreme possibility, the composition is normal, I'm just talking from the tails of its distribution so to speak- we need explanations why we do not appear to be as reactive as some evidence suggests we should be.

I can see how it does, this is probably because we are both reaching for the same position and it is only the implications which we see differently. But both of us can only augment our positions on implication with particular bias to certain logical systems. I will admit I happen to believe that the systems I am biasing have more explanatory power. But that would take a great deal more explaining and I have to go. For now, I simply concede you are right on this point.

Okay, Sorry Magilum, I was rushed. I have a little time spare now so I'll go over it again in better detail.

magilum wrote:

There would have to be something distinguishable, something that definitely is without a mentality.

I don't think I can state my response to this any more clearly, but I'll try. We have distinguished mentality, originally we excepted everything but human intellect, and that became our basis for comparison. From that basis we have detected responses which physically match the human behaviour we ascribed to intellect in all biological organisms down to plants.  Yes, plants respond to stimuli in ways we would have only expected to be able to attribute to something with intellect. The likeness can only be noted in careful time-lapsed experiments, it's not an ordinary observation that suggests plant life possess some form of recognisable mentality; one might say that plant life thinks very slowly compared to human life, but this would be quite obviously opposed to It does not think at all.

The Dodder Plant (this Blog cites it's sources at the footer)

Ultimately it may be that there is no such thing as not mind-like. It is a possibility which we can justifiably consider.

 

Magilum wrote: 

I meant the suggested implications would be a composition fallacy.

 

I'm presuming by implications you mean what I said about your finger reacting electromagnetically with your keyboard. Is that right?

If so, I admit this is an extreme example, but the point ultimately is that if the electron polarities of object surfaces are not determined by some objective law of the universe, then we get left with no hypothesis as to how we actually can exist. At the moment we are still assuming an objective universe exists, of course, but we have also begun to violate this assumption at the quantum level. It would appear as though, eventually, we will face the need to come up with a better assumption to replace it.

 

Magilum wrote:

A physicist could use QM to explain a phenomena, but the phenomena has to exist as more than a nebulous possibility. We should be seeing frequent and repeatable examples of telepathy and telekinesis, for instance, before we should be forced to explain them. Saying that there are complexities at a certain level doesn't demonstrate anything about our experience.

Eloise wrote:

Just for the record, I'm not advancing a hypothesis of complexity, I'm rebutting hypotheses of complexity.

That quantum information exists in multiple states simultaneously is not a theory it's an empirical observation. The phenomenology of probabilistic fundamental units gives us pause to reconsider whether mind is actually as complex as we imagine, to wit, it looks like having the properties that compose mind is pretty ordinary to an electron. To an electron, it is merely one probable self.

None of which contradicts my original point; it may actually advance it.

 

Because we are both arguing for monism, no doubt. Probably nothing I say will contradict your point, most likely I will only advance the same basis in a slightly different direction relying on different models to explain circumstances along the way. I am thinking you would probably draw on evolutionary theory a lot more than me, which would bring evolution's assumptions of time contiguity, independent space and classical locality into your explanation. I avoid these because in my opinion they have lost a lot of weight in explaining reality to us - even though sciences outside of physics and mathematics still frequently rely on them.  Not that I would ignore evolution, I would just be fitting it to a different background picture (there is no contradiction between quantum and evolution, it just offers a slightly different worldview), but my foundational assumptions would be of a quantum universe rather than a classical one, evolutionary theory that relies on a classical universe would not inform my explanation as it would yours.

Because of this gap we'd see very different implications from hypothesising simple mind. Time is always an easy one to demonstrate so I'll use that - the implications you see would be bounded in time, this is necessary to the model that has explained those implications. On the other hand, I don't see implications bounded in time because I do not assume, nor can I, that time bounds physical phenomenon. Time is relata, the idea that time constrains cause-effect events to occur is cum hoc and can't be implied here.

Is this where we find philisophical panentheism? In an underlying order?

Um, yes and no. No if you're thinking I mean to establish that an intrinsic order exists, point to it and say "God did that. The End". But otherwise yes, that is my claim, that an "I am in the father and the father in me" is detectable in an underlying order to the universe. 

PS. I didn't like making that claim in such a bare way, establishing it could be a long process.

I agree with this, it forms part of the philosophy.

No, we probably can't, and there's good and bad in that. A best hypothesis of mind will have to render this issue neutral, I think.

Okay, now I see where you would think that magilum and I would approach this from a different angle (you mentioned evolution before). Not that I can speak for madge, but from an evolutionary standpoint, a creature's adaptation over generations is a kind of confirmation of the physical limitations of its environment. That is, the mind tunes to the universe. So to me, the fact that we describe the universe in terms of mind is circular. But I'm not clear on how your philosophy handles that.

Yes, and I'd rather make it clear than jump to claims, naturally. The fact that we have minds and thus must conceptualise the universe in terms of mind is circular, but alternately we must describe mind in terms of the universe and the theory shouldn't have to fight with any of the evidence, wherein, not only are we running out of distinctions between intellect and the ground of intellect, we have major physical theories which reject events bounded in time. This does not mean that evolution is suddenly no longer bounded in generations, it means generations bounded in time is an assumption which has much less weight. 

{Aside: You can drop that assumption and the theory still works, time only dangles on the outside of generations anyway, so it's not really necessary to anything but the implications you're left with { Or Drop independent space it strengthens evolutionary theory, but it should also make you rethink adaptation.} }

If intellect is of the universe (and it is unless we claim dualism which goes nowhere) then it is not bounded by time, space or locality, the ground of intellect cannot be separated from intellect by an independent agency. This takes away all the constraints that would force the notion of a mind-like universe to be circular. It is now a direct, justified assumption, intellect is only separated from its fundamental unit, by its own manifestations.

Okay, I can answer this. The first thing to note is that I am assuming a quantum universe initially. So that means I am working bottom up from the smallest known elements of existence and using them to describe the universe.

If I were to presuppose the classical description of the universe then my initial assumption includes what is agreed "anthropically" as being ordinarily perceptible time. I would describe ordinarily perceptible time as the asymmetrical distribution of quantum ensembles approximated by entropic asymmetry. But one can just call it an independent passage of time moving forward from past to future.

There is a more fundamental classical time assumption than that which is the time-space continuum. The Time-Space continuum is the manifold upon which a universe sits. Limited interaction is allowed for between the topology of time-space and the events of the universe.  

What I am assuming is in contrast to both of these.

By assuming a quantum universe I have taken the road whereupon I cannot presuppose that the asymmetry of our ordinary perception of time is necessary or explained. Instead, I have given myself to explaining it or finding it necessary by deduction.

The second thing to note is that I've actually made an error of communication in what I said in my last post. It should not read - major physical theories which reject events bounded in time. I meant something more along the lines of - major physical theories which reject that events are bounded by time.

That is: Relativistic theory demonstrates a limited interaction between the time-space manifold and events within it thus those events are not bounded by time, they can push it around, so to speak. And: Quantum theory demonstrates an event-field interaction that produces time, thus quantum events have even more play over time.

In neither case are events bounded by some independent existence of time.

Is that helpful?

Generations have a representation which is independent of time, morphology. You don't need to wrap time around the morphologies of generations for them to have a coherent representation. We see generations, we assume classical time, not the other way round, and such an assumption of time is just extraneous matter (not to mention failed as a hypothesis).

So, I say, evolution appears bounded in generations, but generations are not bounded in time.

 

Assuming intellect is of the universe is to assume it is the manifestation of a physical event. If I assume a quantum universe, then, yes, the mechanism of intellect is not bound in time because the mechanism is the ensemble of quantum physical events, this mechanism bounds time asymmetry, it is not in any way, evidently, bound by time asymmetry (nor the appearance of space nor locality)

 

Because I reject the complexity theory, I would refer to the subject of your last sentence, here, as a specific ordering of the ensemble that produces a distinct time-information interaction.

The latter. Which is a large claim, I realise.

No, everything you've asked is relevant.

Thanks I thought it was time for an update, my old avvie was boring the hell out of me, and when I came across that pic I couldn't resist it.

No, not that I mean to find it necessary, if I find it necessary to a quantum universe then all very well, otherwise I have required myself to find explanation for the observation of forward moving time within the universe.

A single dimension of time is axiomatic. I am not assuming it, no. I assume as many degrees of freedom as the course of the consideration dictates, but I do not limit it a priori to a single dimension of time. As such I am given to explaining why a single dimension of time is what accords with empirical observation.

This is, generally speaking, a convention of Euclidean axioms, which I have not assumed. I am supposing the use of a Constructive Quantum Field theory to derive the analogue of Euclidean space from schotastic vectors. It's not an outrageous proposition, but it is fairly uncommon.

 

The most well known version of this description is 'Time is relative to the observer'. Velocity and Mass distort time, given enough of either, one could potentially slow time to a halt on an infinite gradient.

That is a good description.

In this sense the bound of time is mitigated in terms of relativity. The simplest example is the time rate difference between the space on the surface of the earth and the space in orbit of the earth. The mass of the earth influences the gradient of the manifold giving the earth a somewhat unique rate of time. So the earth is an example of an event which pushes time around, the mass of the earth gives its local time a unique characteristic rate and time 'bounds' the event of the earth in only a limited fashion. However, this is still not my assumption.

This is why we have no bound in time from the assumption of a quantum universe, because we have just such events in a quantum universe. Where you are supposing a bit, at the one dimensional point, I am supposing a qubit prior to that. The qubit represents a phase space of states in superposition. I must collapse this 'bloch sphere' into a point relative to its initial and final conditions in order to describe the bit which is the presupposition of a classical universe.

To collapse the qubit into a bit I am given to describing a mechanism. It is from satisfying this "collapse" with a mechanism that one can derive an atomic unit of mentality.

Quantum events 'producing time' is implied by the 'collapse' from superposition to determinate state, but in any case I am sure you have heard of a quantum event that produced time before, see Big Bang theory.

Yes their description implies time, but the general inference is an inaccurate description of time and there's the rub.

For clarity I am not proposing that we discuss generations outside of a measurement of time, only that we do not assume the implied arrow of time a priori to the discussion. As such, we would not consider a generational snapshot as a freeze-frame of a continuous dimension of time, but as a quantum of morphology. Time could then be discussed in terms of how it interacts with the quanta of morphology.

The smallest unit of a rabbit remains a rabbit, but I don't think we can say for sure that they don't just appear, any more than we can say they are formed over time. Of course we can observe what appears to be the formation of a rabbit from the genes of it's parents over time, but we have no cause to take for granted that we are proving anything in regards to a description of time by having done so. The external passage of time here is an a priori assumption, and one that doesn't hold much water as of late, in any case.

Now we can say that the rabbit generations are formed over minute fluctuations in morphology. An we can say that it appears fluctuations in morphology of rabbit generations are separated into homeomorphic fields of action, and that an ensemble of these fields of action constructs a generational sequence over a degree of freedom which we can call time. In which case time can not be constrained to a single dimension, it is only constrained to the homeomorphisms. That is to say, a rabbit's tail can assume a longer length or a shorter length, both events are equivalent conditions for the existence of generational time. On the other hand a rabbit cannot suddenly grow gills given generational time because the homeomorphism condition is not satisfied on this scale.

What this basically boils down to is time as a probabilistic degree of freedom within the 'rules' of a geometric pattern. You may have heard of a similar idea as this, known as the 'Fractal' Universe.

P.S. I have realised in this paragraph that I may have cut some corners of introduction, so here's an excellent book on the subject of category modelling.

I don't require the assumption that leads to that circularity. I do not require intellect to interact with nature. Intellect is, itself, an interaction of nature.

 

Note that I am saying a firm no to the question of inanimate matter being a least degree of intellect.  That inanimate matter has the capacity to create intellect is non-sequitur, it is already configured into a state of intellect.

 

Hey Will, just a quick note to say I haven't abandoned this discussion, I moved house on the 4th on really short notice and should be back to the forums in a few more days.

I still have a dozen boxes to unpack, and my phone isn't connected, whoever lived here before screwed with the television aerial connection so I have virtually no TV reception and I have to wait on cable... donchya just love moving? Anyhow, I thought I'd get back into the swing of things here to raise my mood.

In reply to post #25

Cool, Will. I just want to say first..

Close! That's really close to what I am saying - only you're citing just a little too much indeterminacy, it's more a relative process.




Yeah, it sure is, so lets just say I am supposing it and skip the rigour. Since we both know solutions exist and are predicted to exist, would you agree that I may assume, say, a Wightman reconstruction to justify the step?

Aside: noting that posting one on a public forum would be akin to doing myself out of a million dollars from Clay Mathematics Institute and probably a Nobel prize.




Ah I see, and I understand, sorry for phrasing it that way. I was trying to emphasise the contrast by inverting the causality, but I do agree with you. Which direction it goes is not a given in general relativity. This is another good reason to strip phenomena to the sub-atomic level and work from interactions rather than causes.




We'd better drop the talk about general relativity cause it's getting confusing and I'm not sure what you're referring to here.  Can I assume that you mean to raise the point that a Minkowski equivalence is not sufficiently real so it wouldn't be right to leap from there, and because a more substantively physical field theory doesn't necessarily exist (Yang-Mills gauge being open ended for example) my suppositions are somehat sky castles, would I be assuming correctly?

I'm actually fine with that as we can get around it later.




This problem doesn't exist, it's more like 'mentality' that doesn't equal mentality, in a sense you could say this concept of mentality which we might attempt to equate with information is illusion. You simply have the correlation of information and nothing more, mentality as it were, is some remnant of that function at it's fundamental level.

The question is not of information constructing mentality, but rather of a lossy processes forming subclass heirarchies that appear exclusive, and thus mentalistic. 





Agreed, and I put it in quotes to indicate that I was only using the term "collapse" in a colloquial sense, I don't mean to infer that a physical collapse occurs. Synonymously I might have used 'decoherence' or 'symmetry breaking', all of which would have generally indicated the lossiness in transition between phase space and classical units that I intended to convey in the picture.
 






I wouldn't say it's more "reasonable" so much as it is a more comfortable assumption. It seems greatly simplified and unconfronting to have a pot of time and throw things in it, rather than to take a pot of things and try to extrapolate time from them, it is empirically justified in the sense that you can put water in a pot of clay easier than you could take clay out of a pot of water. The empirical justification does not, of course, indicate that water must necessary be contained by clay, or that clay cannot be contained in water, it is simply more user friendly to use clay to contain water.


 



What you appear to mean by 'things popping out of nowhere' is a bit loaded. What I am suggesting by it is that Rabbit generations, to continue with the example, do not pop up out of nowhere any more than Quark soup can, just that sans time, they are quark soup.



I'm somewhat only referring to the empirical support which the fractal universe model has. I'm inclined to think of it as the right thing to be looking at, the wrong way to be looking at it. The Fractal model also shares the independent time assumption which I prefer not to make.




Nature is all there is, in that sense nature can't interact until it breaks from what it is somehow. Ifwe say we have a block of data which is all of nature and thus everything, it is clear that if interaction is to occur it must necessarily only occur between individuated sub blocks. Individuated being the key word here. The individuation of these sub blocks is encapsulated in the formal concept of state "selection" in QM. Using classical reasoning you can apply state selection to an non-individuated everything for eternity and never achieve a singular identity, it will always be nature and will not be able to break from being nature. However a quantum statistical tunneling event, in which you may have an abstract object surmount an infinite gradient by having a statistically true value on the other side of the gradient, can achieve this individuation thus by  a quantum statistical distribution of its possible states lying outside of its definition. Once a state outside of the definition is broken to via the tunnelling event, individuated states exist to interact.

Some are tempted by this explanation to jump to the conclusion that the original individuated state is supernatural, "outside of nature", it would seem as though nature in it's completeness stepped outside of itself into a new state of supernature. But it makes no sense to me to do that, if nature is everything, then the new state just adds to the whole and we still have no subblocks and no intrinsic means of interaction. This cannot be right, so suppose it rather that nothing is added to the tunneling object, not even temporarily as in virtual particles or higgs fields but that the quantum leap is, in it's entirety, a net loss of energy from the system.

This makes much more sense (The second law temporarily does not apply here so it is OK). Take the block of data that is nature and everything, it's quantum statistical distribution allows it a definition oustide of itself, and that definition is equal to a data loss. The remaining data considers itself individuated from the lost data. It interacts with the lost data as though with something outside of itself, and within this interaction are intersections which contrast information structures against analogues of varied construction, such is the origin of intellect.
 

Hey Will,

long time no yak on this thread, sorry I've been neglecting it, I'm a bit fickle when it comes to interesting discussions and there are often plenty here to choose from. Anyhow, continuing where we left off...

 

Yeah, that's basically it, well you could even consider it in the form that we (read historical anthropic notion) are a contraction as opposed to extension, as well. This makes an even more relevant point which we will get to eventually.

Good catch, Will, but this is not communication theory, yet. What's lost is correlation data, ie computational resources, not 'source' data.

To make this more accessible, I'll approach it from another angle. What level of precision do our 'human' instruments have? We could say that they are pretty coarse instruments in the basic sense, right? This is kind of true, not the essential point, but keep it in mind.

It's somewhat established in the observations of SQUID experiments that Leggett macrorealism is false; that is, macroscopic "objects" are known to have the characteristics of superposition at their centre of mass. So we can infer that it is yet possible that macro-objects are in a visible superposition, and we simply do not see it.

Why do we not see it? Well it has been supposed, as I did above, that our instruments are too crude, that is, through no fault of our own our predetermined physical structure is a clunky instrument. I depart from this proposal somewhat, I think "we" do the computations, but they are waste to our final state, filtered out by the clamber to this mentalistic physicality. 

So what is lost? Well with superposition remaining detectable at the centre of mass the likely answer to that question is given by what is at the edge of mass where the superposition appears to vanish? The answer is Space-time curvature, or gravity. (Quantum Gravity Computer)

 

Fair point, it's not really a jumble, I know, the point I meant to emphasise was that in using time as the organiser we need not necessarily jump to it doubling as the cause as well. It feels comfortable because time is the organiser of conscious experience, so envisioning a consistent basis for extrapolation sans time is counterintuitive. The 'pot to put things in' contrasted with 'things to put a pot in' was meant to reflect the intuitive nature of time organised data, rather than reflecting on the nature of the data itself. I'm sorry for seeming dismissive of the logic behind useful science in my analogy.

 

Well really the doubtful eye is only cast over the subjectively comfortable intuitions about the evidence, not the evidence itself. The evidence that our universe is cast in string of time is ultimately subjective and compoundedly so in the hard problem of consciousness.  The evidence of time-like evolution is obviously an accurate depiction of a dependent state of the present, it is the nature of the dependency relation which I am hesitant to prescribe to, not the hard evidence of dependence.

I'm just glad we're back to the discussion. Onward!

A contraction? New and interesting concept! Okay, so we as an anthropic group infesting the earth actually make for a contraction of the universe's information? Here I was thinking of "extension" as a wording for abiogenesis. That is, given abiogenesis probably happened by molecules interacting in ways already available to matter in the universe, then our eventual existence is simply a matter of giving those rules time. Maybe "extension" was a bad choice of word for that.

But I don't get "contraction" - do you mean a kind of summary compression of universal data? I know I'm having trouble with all this - bear with me.

Yeah, that's not much of a jump. If an object's centre of mass can be held as a superposition, and the centre of mass is arbitrary for macroscopic objects (which it is in time), then we witness possible superpositions constantly.

We definitely have our limitations - no argument there. But you're talking about us creating such a filter on reality that reality in its fullest form could never reach us; that there's something to our reality forever hidden because certain aspects of reality can't touch other parts of reality. I could see that in the matter/antimatter context, but you'll have to tell me where you're placing this absolute limit on the unknowable.

If you're expressing a kind of fuzzy determinism here, that too is a strong argument considering abiogenesis or Dawkins' selfish gene.

Yikes. I'm not really sold on quantum gravity just yet. I mean, I understand what kind of tantalizing missing gap it is, but we're a long way off from observation there, and the theory, to me (as explained by a former physics professor) is in very early stages.

Don't get me wrong, I see what you're saying: time in the way we interpret it doesn't necessarily capture the entire essence of reality. It is, however, a vantage point. Any "one true" reality should find at least a decent description regardless of the position of the observer.

But that just points out that any descriptive framework supplies inherent limitations. Are those manufactured limitations then the inevitable result of our own human-macro-object's always-lossy waste-computation? And can we not come to a point of calculating the loss, and thus diminish our computational limits?

You really didn't seem dismissive - I was teasing. The point that time is a big unknown -- especially when piecing together scant historical data -- is well made.

As I said, it's a point well made. That's exactly the point where I believe strongly that the humility of the scientist should kick in. For example, the straight-line-to-present evolutionary model isn't taken very seriously outside of museum tours or elementary school classes. It's fair to say that any evolutionary biologist worth their salt knows there were all sorts of odd happenings along the road of evolution. So there's some healthy doubt there in all sorts of places.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that with our limited capacity to measure for most of our history, who's to say massive time dilations haven't, in fact, occurred? It's a definite possibility.