99 replies to this topic

[Ulf Imwiehe]

I wouldn't say that I'm looking for something greater than this existence. I'm pretty well fascincated with the one I have. The world is pretty miraculous place. I'm just looking for clues to the past and answers to questions like why we're here and how'd we get here.

Have you read The Holographic Universe? That shit is cray!

Crazy interesting.

Hah! I've got this (and Uriel's Machine) on top of my to-read pile and will delve into it as soon as I've finished The Invisible Landscape. It's such a fascinating topic. Are we the first? I don't think so. Neither did Jack Kirby.

I think reality being a simulation (like a computer program) is the most likely scenario for creation. It answers a bunch of questions and avoids the whole 'where's God' question. We're not actually made of anything after all - matter is just waves vibrating very fast.

Yeah, who knows, maybe reality is the school an insanely advanced civilizations sends their offspring to. Or a correctional facility.

[Arjan Dirkse]

I tend to agree, Jim. We've always been looking for... something greater than our mundane existence. Something wonderful. If we can't attain it in the flesh why not create a simulacrum? I'm a big believer in human creativity and its hunger for transcendence by any means.

The thing with artificial wonderland realities is that it seems to me devoid of challenge...once you're there, I imagine it would be terribly boring. I'd spend a few hours marvelling at the wonder of the pretty things the computer makes appear before me, and then I'd have sex orgies with soulless computer animations for a few days...and then what? It would be like a long holiday in some kind of sterile beach resort from hell.

There is nothing greater than our mundane existence.

Nor is there anything smaller.

[Jim Ohara]

Yeah, who knows, maybe reality is the school an insanely advanced civilizations sends their offspring to. Or a correctional facility.

Or maybe it's just a video game. The Gods of Olympus traveled down from the heavens and took the appearance of man just to have something to do. What better for an immortal all-powerful spirit than to spend a time thinking they're something else?

Alternate reality explains pretty much everything. And it makes life so much easier to accept. Enjoying the game, and in turn enjoying life is pretty much the core philosophy for most religions.

The thing with artificial wonderland realities is that it seems to me devoid of challenge...once you're there, I imagine it would be terribly boring. I'd spend a few hours marvelling at the wonder of the pretty things the computer makes appear before me, and then I'd have sex orgies with soulless computer animations for a few days...and then what?

You don't play video games? Watch movies? Read books? Read comics? Paint pictures? Every loved a dog or a teddy bear? Almost all our free time is spent using our imaginations. Alternate reality seems to be the thing we most look for.

[Arjan Dirkse]

Or maybe it's just a video game. The Gods of Olympus traveled down from the heavens and took the appearance of man just to have something to do. What better for an immortal all-powerful spirit than to spend a time thinking they're something else?

Alternate reality explains pretty much everything. And it makes life so much easier to accept. Enjoying the game, and in turn enjoying life is pretty much the core philosophy for most religions.



You don't play video games? Watch movies? Read books? Read comics? Paint pictures? Every loved a dog or a teddy bear? Almost all our free time is spent using our imaginations. Alternate reality seems to be the thing we most look for.

I've read books...but I wouldn't want to live in them. Same for video games, movies etc.

[Ulf Imwiehe]

I've read books...but I wouldn't want to live in them. Same for video games, movies etc.

How about living in a story that you write yourself (perhaps even without knowing it)?

[craggy]

I want to live in a story I write myself, but the world keeps rewriting all the other characters.

[Ulf Imwiehe]

Time to go creator-owned!

[Arjan Dirkse]

How about living in a story that you write yourself (perhaps even without knowing it)?

I don't think I am a very good writer...so no.

[Ogul]

[quote]Munck is saying there is an intended purpose though, to communicate to future generations through a universal language - math.[/quote]

Then why wouldn't they use universal math? I mean, there are universal constants in math. Several sci-fi books I've read have discussed this concept, but a lot of the math we use if a bit arbitrary, we use it because it makes sense to us, because it's easy for us, but not because it's universally recognizable. Some of the more universal elements are like the atomic number of hydrogen (and other atoms), or the speed of light (but not necessarily the numbers used to write that speed down), or the temperature at which water boils or freezes, or Pi. That's like the distinction between the Celsius and Fahrenheit temperature systems. So why would they create a "code" that uses arbitrary values like a 360 degree circle, feet, miles, etc., when that isn't a universal basis?

[quote]
A very ancient system of numbers was used in the system, which we will call "Gematria."
"Gematrian" numbers are found in ancient myths and religions, including the Bible. [/quote]

From what I understand, there's nothing particularly "mysterious" about Munck's Gematria, they are just numbers that are fun for math geeks, ones with unusual primes, or roots, or other interesting outcomes when you multiple and divide them, that sort of thing. Assuming a base ten system, they would be similarly interesting to multiple cultures as a design curiosity, but that doesn't imply any sort of shared understanding.

[quote]
The system also uses conventions that are still in use, such as the 360 degree circle, 60 minute degree, 60 second minute, the base-ten numbering system, the 12-inch foot, and the 5280-foot mile.[/quote]

Yes, but why? They're in use today (though not for much longer, perhaps), there's no reason to believe that they were in use in the distant past. The standard foot and mile are extremely arbitrary figures, they are essentially "here's a foot, and a mile is. . . a whole bunch of those." Egyptians used cubits, which were an entirely different, but equally arbitrary unit of measure. Even the actual foot would have been different in ancient times, as average height was well shorter than today.

[quote]I'm not here to convince you. I'm just presenting what I think is fascinating stuff. Like I said before, I believe that taking everything into account it's safe'ish to assume Wilten is onto something with that location. Different sources throughout time pointing to the same location is too much of a coincidence for me. Whether or not Kircher lied about other things doesn't taint this in my view.[/quote]

Fair enough, but why do you believe that Kircher's Atlantis map is factual when so much of his work was variably completely made up nonsense. It'd be like if JK Rowling insisted that Harry Potter was a documentary, but also created a map of Atlantis that she also insisted was 100% fact, why would you believe that?

[quote]The most famous being the Pyramids at Giza which are older, much larger and more complex than the tomb pyramids in the same area.[/quote]

What do you mean? The Pyramids at Giza were tomb pyramids. And there's a fairly easy to follow progression from mastabas to primitive pyramids, to the great pyramids, and then they declined after that, presumably because they couldn't work up the effort to keep making such massive and overall pointless structures. There are no younger pyramids than the great ones that were "less complex" so much as "less ambitious."

[quote]After all, if some catastrophe crippled our civilization and decimated our population worldwide, ten thousand or a hundred thousand years from now, almost nothing built in the past century would remain except in scraps and remnants.[/quote]

Yes, but if that were so then we likely would have at least found some scraps or remnants. All we find of ancient civilzations are great big rocks. It seems likely that if there had ever been a modern+ civilization in antiquity, we would have found a decaying ipod by now somewhere. After all, plastics last practically forever, machined metals would leave some traces of their presence, and in only the past hundred years we've changed the earth in ways that would easily be detectable thousands of years from now.

[quote]Was there a global civilization with advanced but different technology that allowed unusually good stonework with blocks too large for us to successfully move with modern equipment?[/quote]

There definitely was, but it was a lateral movement, not an advanced one. Basically, different cultures advanced along different paths, and in some cases this meant that they developed more advanced manual masonry techniques than we have, but that doesn't mean that they had advanced technology. The Maya, for example, had very advanced astronomy and stone-moving for their time, but didn't have the wheel, metal-working, or many other basic sciences.

[quote]
Essentially, we could conceivably build the devices that could move that weight of stonework, but we don't really have the equipment strong enough for the larger 100-ton and 400-ton blocks used in various temples and pyramids around the world - and it still would not be easy for us to do so as precisely as the original builders did apparently without even using levers and pulleys since those should not have been known at the time.[/quote]

Most cultures with advanced stone-moving did have levers and pulleys, if we don't know that for sure, we at least don't know for a fact that they didn't.

[quote]The term "Gematrian numbers" appears to have been wholly invented by Munck, it is not used by students of Gematria as far as I am aware.[/quote]

Check that web page Lucian linked to, it explains where it comes from, which is essentially that nobody in "the establishment" would tell him what Gematria "really" was, but then some random anonymous strange gave him all sorts of 'documents" from who knows where that explained the whole thing. I chalk it up to a practical joke by some bored math major.

[quote]
Depends on what you need for proof. Certainly the gods of the Sumerians - who needed to eat and behaved like people do - also correspond to the gods of the Egyptians, Greeks and Indo-Europeans from the Celtic to the Hindu. More tenuously, some archaeologists have noted similarities between Sumerian gods and Native American gods - but that is very controversial.[/quote]

Yes, but only in the general sense that they each represent basic elements of human nature and shared natural phenomena. I mean, it's not shocking that each culture tends to have a rain god or a sun god or a god of love.

[quote]
That's a good point, but there is no direct connection between one and the other. If there was this world-wide prehistoric civilization, then there would have had to have been some sort of serious catastrophe to wipe it out to such an extent - BUT that catastrophe would not have affected remnants of primitive cultures, like cave paintings hidden deep away from the elements and early tools and artifacts that had already long been buried by sediment over time. Whatever the catastrophe could have been, they were already protected from it - and there is always the possibility that we haven't properly dated these artifacts and they arose during the dark age between civilizations.[/quote]

And any global catastrophe big enough to wipe out a global advanced civilization would have left tracks easily seen by geologists, and the fact remains that there is no evidence for a globalized disaster at any point within the past dozens of millennia. If there was an advanced global civilization wiped out by a devastating event, it would have had to have been hundreds of thousands of years ago, when humanity was a very young species.

[quote]

I read once that if every human alive in North America right now died, and if in millions of years people dug up the ground looking for evidence, they'd find a quarter of a skeleton. That's the proportional total of the dinosaur bones we've dug up - and from that quarter skeleton we know so much. But imagine what we don't know.[/quote]

Yes, but then that is only the organic matter, the inorganic would last much longer. You wouldn't see the Statue of Liberty's head on a beach, perhaps, but there would be all sorts of treasure troves left about.

[quote]
They had Siri?[/quote]

That might explain their cultural collapse. . .

[quote]
I wonder how humanity is going to deal with the reality that time travel space travel aren't ever going to happen.[/quote]

It could, it's just highly unlikely that we'll ever have the ability to travel into our own timeline and change things. There's still the potential for time travel that can only function in a loop (like you can only travel as far back as the invention of the time machine), or that allows time travel into parallel universes (you could go back and kill Hitler but then when you return nothing happened in this universe), or that require a closed loop fate-driven system (you could go back and try to kill Hitler, but you'd fail, and whatever you tried would already be history before you started because anything you did was already what had happened so nobody ever notices).

[quote]I'm just looking for clues to the past and answers to questions like why we're here and how'd we get here.[/quote]

It's turtles, all the way down. Seriously though, if you're looking for answers, study quantum physics, not pseudo-history.

[quote]
The thing with artificial wonderland realities is that it seems to me devoid of challenge...once you're there, I imagine it would be terribly boring. I'd spend a few hours marvelling at the wonder of the pretty things the computer makes appear before me, and then I'd have sex orgies with soulless computer animations for a few days...and then what? It would be like a long holiday in some kind of sterile beach resort from hell.[/quote]

You clearly have not played Skyrim.

[craggy]

Ogul, saying that stuff would definitely be around is doing our ancient ancestors a disservice. I'm sure in the future of this current society there will be more and more attempts to make things biodegradable. and older stuff which isn't will be repurposed. Long, long ago, previous societies might have been smarter than us, and found a way to make their stuff all join back into the Earth somehow, in some kind of Lion King style circle of life. Just because we can't currently imagine a way to do something doesn't mean that someone else hasn't already done it.


Or maybe they just really liked rocks.

[Ogul]

Ogul, saying that stuff would definitely be around is doing our ancient ancestors a disservice. I'm sure in the future of this current society there will be more and more attempts to make things biodegradable. and older stuff which isn't will be repurposed. Long, long ago, previous societies might have been smarter than us, and found a way to make their stuff all join back into the Earth somehow, in some kind of Lion King style circle of life. Just because we can't currently imagine a way to do something doesn't mean that someone else hasn't already done it.

I could buy that an advanced society would develop biodegradable tech, but I still imagine they would have to go through a "wasteful" period. Also, I imagine there would still be signs of human adaptation of nature, like dried canals, worked mountains, etc. It's highly unlikely that an advanced society could develop to at least our level without leaving some significant signs of it in the environment that would last. For an advanced society to not leave such a trace would imply not just a catastrophe that wiped them out, but a deliberate effort to hide their tracks.

There are even resource considerations, such as the need for raw materials. Modern cultures developed as we did because of meteoric metals deposited at or near the surface. These take millions of years to develop, and if some previous society had made use of them, there would be nothing left to have sparked the bronze and iron ages in the western cultures.

[Lucian Von Dooom]

[quote name='Ogul' timestamp='1340056135' post='2447240']
Then why wouldn't they use universal math? I mean, there are universal constants in math. Several sci-fi books I've read have discussed this concept, but a lot of the math we use if a bit arbitrary, we use it because it makes sense to us, because it's easy for us, but not because it's universally recognizable. Some of the more universal elements are like the atomic number of hydrogen (and other atoms), or the speed of light (but not necessarily the numbers used to write that speed down), or the temperature at which water boils or freezes, or Pi. That's like the distinction between the Celsius and Fahrenheit temperature systems. So why would they create a "code" that uses arbitrary values like a 360 degree circle, feet, miles, etc., when that isn't a universal basis?
[/quote]But they do use constants. One of the first things listed on the site is "The Code system uses mathematical constants, such as pi and the radian." And since when is a 360 degree circle not a constant? Aren't all circles 360 degrees? The Golden Ratio is also found in the great Pyramids and it's a constant.
[quote name='Ogul' timestamp='1340056135' post='2447240']
Yes, but why? They're in use today (though not for much longer, perhaps), there's no reason to believe that they were in use in the distant past. The standard foot and mile are extremely arbitrary figures, they are essentially "here's a foot, and a mile is. . . a whole bunch of those." Egyptians used cubits, which were an entirely different, but equally arbitrary unit of measure. Even the actual foot would have been different in ancient times, as average height was well shorter than today.
[/quote]Well some believe the metric system is part of a vast conspiracy as well...but that's a story for another time.
[quote name='Ogul' timestamp='1340056135' post='2447240']
Fair enough, but why do you believe that Kircher's Atlantis map is factual when so much of his work was variably completely made up nonsense. It'd be like if JK Rowling insisted that Harry Potter was a documentary, but also created a map of Atlantis that she also insisted was 100% fact, why would you believe that?
[/quote]I never considered it's validity until Danny found the land mass using it and other information. Plus, it's not like all of Kircher's work was shit. I mean, he's still considered the founder of Egyptology. Only some of his translations have been disproved. Do you discredit everything he's done because of this? That seems rash.
[quote name='Ogul' timestamp='1340056135' post='2447240']
What do you mean? The Pyramids at Giza were tomb pyramids. And there's a fairly easy to follow progression from mastabas to primitive pyramids, to the great pyramids, and then they declined after that, presumably because they couldn't work up the effort to keep making such massive and overall pointless structures. There are no younger pyramids than the great ones that were "less complex" so much as "less ambitious."
[/quote]Not everyone believes they were tombs and in fact some think the Pharoahs placed their tombs in already existing pyramids. But I have seen a documentary that showed the progression between the pyramids and it made a lot of sense too so who knows...
[quote name='Ogul' timestamp='1340056135' post='2447240']
And any global catastrophe big enough to wipe out a global advanced civilization would have left tracks easily seen by geologists, and the fact remains that there is no evidence for a globalized disaster at any point within the past dozens of millennia. If there was an advanced global civilization wiped out by a devastating event, it would have had to have been hundreds of thousands of years ago, when humanity was a very young species.
[/quote]What about the Great Deluge? I thought they proved that there was a great flood?
[quote name='Ogul' timestamp='1340056135' post='2447240']
That might explain their cultural collapse. . .
[/quote]This made me lol.
[quote name='Ogul' timestamp='1340056135' post='2447240']
It's turtles, all the way down. Seriously though, if you're looking for answers, study quantum physics, not pseudo-history.
[/quote]I will study all of it. I have plenty of years in me for both. It's all fascinating to me. Religion too.

[Ogul]

[quote]And since when is a 360 degree circle not a constant? Aren't all circles 360 degrees? The Golden Ratio is also found in the great Pyramids and it's a constant.[/quote]

The 360 degree circle is not a constant. It's an arbitrary number we use. It's like take a clock, right? It's divided into 12 slices? You could as easily have it so that math uses 12 "hours" to define a circle instead of 360 "degrees", so long as everyone uses the same numbers in their math, they get the same answers. It's like how you can do physics problems using feet, or using meters, but as long as you don't mix them, the answers still work (but if you do mix them you get explosions). The only constants when it comes to circles is pi and how it interacts with the circle's radius, circumference, area, etc. He does use some constants in his work, yes, but he also uses several non-constants, like feet and miles, which invalidates any results he may achieve while using them. It's a bit like mixing poo into your cooking, the other ingredients might be great, but the resulting meal is inedible.

[quote]Well some believe the metric system is part of a vast conspiracy as well...but that's a story for another time.[/quote]

Hey, I still innately use the English system in my head, but I have to admit that the metric system is the more scientifically logical.

[quote]I never considered it's validity until Danny found the land mass using it and other information. Plus, it's not like all of Kircher's work was shit. I mean, he's still considered the founder of Egyptology. Only some of his translations have been disproved. Do you discredit everything he's done because of this? That seems rash.[/quote]

I just consider it all highly suspect. I would not take him as a primary source.

[quote]Not everyone believes they were tombs and in fact some think the Pharoahs placed their tombs in already existing pyramids.[/quote]

That's stupid.

[quote]What about the Great Deluge? I thought they proved that there was a great flood?[/quote]

Nope. There was never any global flood, particularly not one caused by excessive rainfall. The last time the Earth's been entirely or even mostly submerged was like a billion years ago before the continents formed. What there is is a lot of little floods, all over the place and at different times, so pretty much every culture has some sort of flood story, and they all follow similar lines because, how else are you going to tell a flood story, but they aren't the same flood story. There some evidence that maybe some small areas of the world faced massive flooding in the past due to tsunamis and such, to the point that people living there might believe the entire world had been submerged, but everywhere else was fine.

Btw, with your interest in pseudo-science, I found this while looking into the claims presented here:

[quote]
366 geometry or 366-degree geometry (also called megalithic geometry) is the name given to an hypothetical geometry supposedly used and perhaps created by an alleged megalithic civilization of Britain and Brittany, France, according to British authors Alan Butler and Christopher Knight, and French author Sylvain Tristan. This geometry, whose origin is claimed to go back to c. 3500 BC, would have used a 366-degree circle rather than a 360-degree circle as we do today.[1]
366 geometry is mainly viewed as pseudoscience by mainstream science; defenders of the theory claim that anyone (scholars and laymen alike) may easily verify the truthfulness of their assertions, the "facts" being, in their terms, "fully testable and checkable" for "anyone with internet access."[2][/quote]

That sounds fun, eh?

I'd really love to see a pseudo-science battle, not between a pseudo-scientist and a real scientist that's having a nervous breakdown at how stupid this all is, but between two crackpots that each have mutually exclusive theories for the same situation.

[David Meadows]

Check that web page Lucian linked to, it explains where it comes from, which is essentially that nobody in "the establishment" would tell him what Gematria "really" was,

That's very weird. I had been studying Kaballah less than three months when I had all of Gematria explained to me.

Perhaps he just meant that the authentic explanation is too boring so it couldn't possibly be what it really was?

[Ogul]

That's very weird. I had been studying Kaballah less than three months when I had all of Gematria explained to me.

You had their Gematria explained to you, but this apparently wasn't sufficient for Mr. Munck:

Some readers may be familiar with the Greek system of Gematria, or others, which have numbers such as 666, 777 and 888. Carl Munck first encountered the word "Gematria" around 1986. When he tried to find information about Gematria, he found that the word was not in the dictionary, and that the libraries and book stores had nothing about it. Several years later he met a "genuine shaman of Gematria - code name HannaH," who virtually buried Carl with Gematrian materials.
The Gematria explained by HannaH's material is not the same system used by the Ancient Greeks, or other familiar systems. The Gematrian numbers all are divisible by nine and add to nine or a multiple. Carl noted that the basic numbers always end in 0, 2, 4, 6, or 8.

[Todd Gross]

Yeah, who knows, maybe reality is the school an insanely advanced civilizations sends their offspring to. Or a correctional facility.

Earth is the Violent Ward!

[David Meadows]

my post is empty

Edited by David Meadows, 19 June 2012 - 01:28 PM.

[Lucian Von Dooom]

The 360 degree circle is not a constant. It's an arbitrary number we use. It's like take a clock, right? It's divided into 12 slices? You could as easily have it so that math uses 12 "hours" to define a circle instead of 360 "degrees", so long as everyone uses the same numbers in their math, they get the same answers. It's like how you can do physics problems using feet, or using meters, but as long as you don't mix them, the answers still work (but if you do mix them you get explosions). The only constants when it comes to circles is pi and how it interacts with the circle's radius, circumference, area, etc. He does use some constants in his work, yes, but he also uses several non-constants, like feet and miles, which invalidates any results he may achieve while using them. It's a bit like mixing poo into your cooking, the other ingredients might be great, but the resulting meal is inedible.

Gotcha. Makes sense. I don't get how using feet and miles would invalidate his results though. We don't build things using only constants. Maybe I'm missing your point.

Btw, with your interest in pseudo-science, I found thiswhile looking into the claims presented here:

I'm totally going to check this out. Thanks.

[Ogul]

Gotcha. Makes sense. I don't get how using feet and miles would invalidate his results though. We don't build things using only constants. Maybe I'm missing your point.

Well basically, if you have a math system that creates a coincidental result that's in miles, then that result would only mean anything at all if the people who made it used miles. For example, if I were to build a pyramid in which the dimensions in feet could be passed through a formula and then the resultant number in miles was the distance to the nearest McDonalds (Shock!) then you could perhaps speculate that I had intended that, that I made the dimensions of the pyramid were some sort of signpost to the nearest McDonalds or something. However, that would only make any sense if I used the foot and the mile as my forms of measurement. If, instead, I did all my math in the metric system, then the dimensions of my pyramid in meters would have no relation in kilometers to the nearest McDonalds. It would be akin to me leaving a secret message to you in Portuguese, which I do not myself understand.

So to claim that an ancient civilization somehow encoded patterns into their structures based on dimensions, but using a system of dimensions that they did not know of, makes no sense. That's why constants are important, if the code were based entirely on mathematical constants, values that while not every civilization discovered them, would remain true and available for discovery for any civilization, would be more likely to be viable despite the mathematical system used to decode them. Any code that used anything that wasn't a constant is only of any value when using the exact same measurement system that this ancient culture was using, and to believe that they just happened to use the completely, ridiculously arbitrary system of feet and miles that we use today would be the most massive coincidence of this entire theory, akin to saying that there was a tribe of jungle people in Patagonia that five thousand years ago all spoke perfect English. With a New York accent.

[craggy]

where is the nearest mcdonald's to the pyramids?