Perceiving Reality is hard

I stumbled on www.perceivingreality.com tonight. It is basically just a place holder for a video in which some guy tells you why you don’t understand reality in its truest form.

I really like philosophy, so I watched the whole thing. I couldn’t embed it so you’ll have to just go there to check it out. But come back after!

Basically, it argues that people are in a sort of box, cut off from reality by our 5 senses.  Since our senses only interpret the universe around us, we don’t actually get a true understanding of reality.

Fine, I’ll accept that.  There must be some sort of transliteration between the universe and my brain.

But then the video goes on to explain that there is a kind of knowledge available that will let you experience the universe directly, as if you were not in the box.  And this is apparently a good thing because while inside the box everything sucks, outside the box is totally sweet.  Sounds great right?

That is when you find out that the whole thing is a sort of advertisement for BNEI Baruch Kabbalah Learning Center.  I can’t really speak to the validity of the center or it’s teaching – honestly, I didn’t even click the link to find out more information about it.  But I do have a question:

If we can only experience the universe through our 5 senses, and these are so limited that it is like we are stuck in a box, then how does this center know that outside the box is so awesome?

Seems fishy to me.

A universe without a big bang?

Could Stephen Hawking be wrong?  Wun-Yi Shu, an associate professor at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, has proposed a new cosmological model that is able to describe the universe as well as Big Bang theory can, but without having to rely on a big bang, a big crunch or dark energy.

And the best part? In Shu’s model the speed of light and the gravitational “constant” are not constant! Instead, they vary with the evolution of the universe.  (Is that a loophole big enough for intergalactic travel in our future?)

Basically, Shu proposes that time and space can be converted into one another using a varying speed of light as the conversion factor. He thinks that mass and length should also be interchangeable, using a varying gravitational “constant” and a varying speed of light as conversion factors as well.

Essentially, time is converted into space and mass is converted into length, as the universe expands.

You can find the paper here: Cosmological Models with No Big Bang, or just grab the PDF directly.