No boundaries

I agree with you so much in your answers - the hopelessness of immortality is a scary prospect, it's a good job that we'll be busy worshipping God. The parting of The Red Sea is an interesting one, some modern Bibles have changed this to the parting of "The Reed Sea" which is a much smaller streamlike body of water in that area.

You wrote:

And it's not hard to see why. "Of course Y follows from X, you fool!" But not if X hasn't been agreed upon.

You know me, I'm even worse than that. I do not even subscribe to "If X then X" so it's impossible to have any debate with me unless I make an assumption that X does indeed mean X and will always mean X. I have no faith that the Universe is reasonable at all.

Incidentally, it looks like Stephen Hawking has been reading our blog because he is coming around to this way of thinking. He recently (Feb 2006) published a (relatively) easy to read paper with Thomas Hertzog called "Populating the Landscape: A Top Down Approach".

The summary says:

The top down approach we have described leads to a profoundly different view of cosmology, and the relation between cause and effect. Top down cosmology is a framework in which one essentially traces the histories backwards, from a spacelike surface at the present time. The no boundary histories of the universe thus depend on what is being observed, contrary to the usual idea that the universe has a unique, observer independent history. In some sense no boundary initial conditions represent a sum over all possible initial states. This is in sharp contrast with the bottom-up approach, where one assumes there is a single history with a well defined starting point.

They're not quite at "Truth is relative" yet but I have faith that they will get there :-) I recommend that you have a look at the paper as it's the start of grasping the principles of quantum mechanics as applied to the entire Universe.

Food - it's true, I am not very adventurous. I don't like adventure in general ! I'm a stay at home kind of person. Life is just too hard out there for a slug.