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Einstein's insight

Abraxas

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A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty... We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
- Albert Einstein
Recently I have given this sort of theories a lot of thought and I would like to see if anyone from the forum has some personal view about something similar to this.

Here's also a video (and a funny song) where Rob Bryanton, author of Imagining the Tenth Dimension , gives a well constructed interpretation on Einstein's quote above, which greatly resamples my personal interpretation as well.

YouTube- You are Me and We Are All Together

I wasn't sure where to post this, I consider the topic as the philosophy of physics. So feel free to move this thread, if necessary.
 

citrusbreath95

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This was rather interesting- I'm actually working on the book he mentioned :D (though I haven't gotten to the part he is describing) The part of the video where he talks of his dream; living an infinite amount of lives, or all possible lives, reminds me greatly of this idea/theory in physics (I think it's called the Multiverse Theory/universe, and also the Many Worlds Interpretation). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
 

jachian

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Recently I have given this sort of theories a lot of thought and I would like to see if anyone from the forum has some personal view about something similar to this.

Here's also a video (and a funny song) where Rob Bryanton, author of Imagining the Tenth Dimension , gives a well constructed interpretation on Einstein's quote above, which greatly resamples my personal interpretation as well.

YouTube- You are Me and We Are All Together

I wasn't sure where to post this, I consider the topic as the philosophy of physics. So feel free to move this thread, if necessary.

It's all crap...... this guy is an idiot.

Only Einstien himself could explain exactly what he was talking about.............
however if he was rambling on about that eastern mysticism crap then am sorely disappointed in him.
 

Vrecknidj

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Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty...
Sounds like a mixture of Buddhism and something else. And, while I have nothing against Buddhists, I find this sentence to be false. I don't think we "must" do this.

Dave
 

Abraxas

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Thank you, citrusbreath, for providing a more "sane" point of view on these theories that have been troubling my mind. I believe you've saved me from composing a song similar to the one on the video:D The many-worlds interpretation is something I might read more about.

I can definetly understand the feeling most get when watching this video. It's like seeing someone dancing enthusiastically, but you wouldn't hear any music. And if you told this guy that there's no music, he would respond that the music is in his head.

It's a thin line between a genius and an insane. In order to see the difference, I believe you would have to be one or the other.
 

muzza

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Do we also have to speak in elvish in this new world?

ps. I reakon he said this at a later stage in his life. And on an aside, if we have conflicting views about a moral issue at two different points in our life, is the more recent view necessarily the right one?
 

Da Blob

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I have great respect for Einstein and although he is most remembered for his physics, his philosophy is also the product of a great mind. Of course, he did not write much and label it philosophy, so one has to cobble together a view of his from various and sundry places.

The fact that he saw Time as a product of the human imagination without 'real' physical manifestation may be one of the most important of his observations.

As far as the evolution of Self from Me to We, there are all sorts of speculations as to the collective consciousness he is suggesting that 'we' must achieve to survive as a species. Hive minds, AI/human cyborgs, the Omega Point, the Singularity etc.

Personally, I am sticking with the old tried and true method of the Christian Self...
 

TruthSeeker

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^ I agree. His physics was more of a watershed thing, but the reason why I admire him so much as a person is basically because of his philosophy. You would have to look hard to find a more beautiful soul; peaceful, humanistic, compassionate, blisteringly intelligent...
 

IfloatTHRUlife

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I dont really see it as a theory, its just a statement. He was simply stressing the importance of understanding the world and everything in it if we are to better ourselves. I mean think about it.. he is an INTP just like the rest of us, and considering what i have read about his lifestyle, he probably was dangerously focused on his Ti function, later in his life after he had acheived what he set out to do, (which he put an AMAZING amount of effort into his theories considering the intp tendency to skip from interest to interest) he probably started developing his Fe, spending time traveling all over the world, meeting different people, and began thinking more about society than space and time.

It could possibly be a thought stemming from the world wars also, he was right there, in the middle of it, dealing with a lot of people involved in the wars. He never liked war and the quote could be result of his hopes for peace.
 

EyeSeeCold

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This was rather interesting- I'm actually working on the book he mentioned :D (though I haven't gotten to the part he is describing) The part of the video where he talks of his dream; living an infinite amount of lives, or all possible lives, reminds me greatly of this idea/theory in physics (I think it's called the Multiverse Theory/universe, and also the Many Worlds Interpretation). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
I've never wanted to be able to live an infinite amount of lives, but I can identify with wanting to live through all possible outcomes of big decisions I have had decide on in my life.
 

citrusbreath95

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I've never wanted to be able to live an infinite amount of lives, but I can identify with wanting to live through all possible outcomes of big decisions I have had decide on in my life.

Well the idea I believe was originally created to avoid any paradoxes that might occur from space and time travel. For example, the largely familiar grandfather paradox. It was suppose to be so that if you went back in time, you could perhaps go to another dimension (universe) with a similar life to yours, and therefore such changes made there wouldn't create problems in your present time. It makes time traveling more acceptable, though many people consider it more metaphysics than possible concrete, mathematical proof.
 

dreamoftheunknown

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I dont really see it as a theory, its just a statement. He was simply stressing the importance of understanding the world and everything in it if we are to better ourselves.

More than likely. Reading this thread, I saw way too much over-interpretation of this quote. It's really very simple. We see the world through our eyes and interpret it through out thoughts and understanding, but we find it difficult to see things through someone else's eyes. So, we can very easily fall into the trap of being self-centered. Only by opening ourselves to others, by accounting for others in the equation can we develop the harmony that will allow us to survive. You really don't have to go to Eastern mysticism or Multiverse theory for that. Just because it came from Einstein doesn't make it prophetic and esoteric.

I mean think about it.. he is an INTP just like the rest of us, and considering what i have read about his lifestyle, he probably was dangerously focused on his Ti function, later in his life after he had acheived what he set out to do, (which he put an AMAZING amount of effort into his theories considering the intp tendency to skip from interest to interest) he probably started developing his Fe, spending time traveling all over the world, meeting different people, and began thinking more about society than space and time.

I hate to burst you bubble, but no. Einstein never achieved what he set out to do, which was to unify electromagnetism and gravity. He spent the last 30 years of his life pursuing this failed quest, ignoring everything else, including contemporary developments in his own field. During that time, physics had discovered two more fundamental forces, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force. He didn't even know about it.

It could possibly be a thought stemming from the world wars also, he was right there, in the middle of it, dealing with a lot of people involved in the wars. He never liked war and the quote could be result of his hopes for peace.

Now, this, I'll give you is, possible.
 

merzbau

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sounds like E was describing something akin to Bohm's view of the universe. Bohm had some interesting things to say about the nature of thought and perception. He also proposed a solution, in the form of a Dialogue that studies the process of thought, as it relates to other's thoughts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm#Thought_as_a_System

...the general tacit assumption in thought is that it's just telling you the way things are and that it's not doing anything - that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the info. But you don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally. This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against what it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it. And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call "sustained incoherence".

Bohm thus proposes in his book, Thought as a System, a pervasive, systematic nature of thought:

What I mean by "thought" is the whole thing - thought, felt, the body, the whole society sharing thoughts - it's all one process. It is essential for me not to break that up, because it's all one process; somebody else's thoughts becomes my thoughts, and vice versa. Therefore it would be wrong and misleading to break it up into my thoughts, your thoughts, my feelings, these feelings, those feelings... I would say that thought makes what is often called in modern language a system. A system means a set of connected things or parts. But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence. A corporation is organized as a system - it has this department, that department, that department. They don't have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on. Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thoughts, "felts" and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times. A system is constantly engaged in a process of development, change, evolution and structure changes...although there are certain features of the system which become relatively fixed. We call this the structure.... Thought has been constantly evolving and we can't say when that structure began. But with the growth of civilization it has developed a great deal. It was probably very simple thought before civilization, and now it has become very complex and ramified and has much more incoherence than before. Now, I say that this system has a fault in it - a "systematic fault". It is not a fault here, there or here, but it is a fault that is all throughout the system. Can you picture that? It is everywhere and nowhere. You may say "I see a problem here, so I will bring my thoughts to bear on this problem". But "my" thought is part of the system. It has the same fault as the fault I'm trying to look at, or a similar fault. Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn’t notice that it's creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_Dialogue

unfortunately, i suspect this approach (collectively sitting down and talking without direction) is rendered impotent by the general accelerating pace of life and increasing incoherency and triviality of information (signal to noise), not to mention our tendency to isolate ourselves from others and shift our social lives into technological avenues. like internet forums.
 
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