Taxonomy

Submitted by jhwierenga on Wed, 08/01/2018 - 16:09

Click on a tag on any page in order to obtain a definition of the taxonomic term and a list of all pages tagged with that term.

Taxonomy terms

The connection between natural law quanta and the quanta affected by them is a 2-way street. A change in natural law affects all manifestations of it. A change in a manifestation affects the natural law quanta.

Absolute nothingness is the state from which the initial quantum arose. In it, there is no time, no space, no matter or energy. Not even an absence of these, for the very notion of ‘something’ is utterly alien to the nothingness. No darkness, for the absence of light can only said to have meaning if there is such a thing as light, and there isn’t. Nor any other meaning either, for meaning presumes something to attach meaning to. Really nothing, not even a nothing with the propensity to become something. Nor even any rules or natural order, for they must apply to the notion of something. The number zero is non-existent, as are all other numbers, or any mathematics, or anything else we might consider to be beyond time and place, for that would imply meaning. Nothingness, nowhere there, logically prior to reason and cause.

Life on Earth is abundantly present wherever it can possible exist, in very many forms.

(text copied from the Wikipedia article on this subject) Adaptive mutation states that rather than mutations and evolution being random, they are in response to specific stresses. In other words, the mutations that occur are more beneficial and specific to the given stress, instead of random and not a response to anything in particular. It should be noted that the term stress refers to any change in the environment, such as temperature, nutrients, population size, etc. Tests with microorganisms have found that for adaptive mutation, more of the mutations observed after a given stress were more effective at dealing with the stress than chance alone would suggest is possible. This theory of adaptive mutation was first brought to academic attention in the 1980s by John Cairns.

Alan Mathison Turing (1912 - 1954) was an English computer scientist, mathematician, logician and cryptanalyst. Among many other things, he tried to identify which sorts of problems computers could solve - computable problems - and which they couldn't. He determined that computers would in general be unable to solve problems in which they themselves were part of the problem.

Altruism is behaviour which is typical for, or at least frequently manifested by, individuals within a species, which is advantageous for populations within the species to which the individual belongs, but detrimental to the individual's prospects of reproduction.

'Arrival of the fittest' is a priori natural selection:  the universe selects solutions before making them real, in the sense of existing absolutely rather than existing as one solution in a superposition of solutions.

The ' arrow of time' is the phenomenon that time is observed to flow from the past toward the future, and never the other way round.

temporality is the property of existing outside of quantum time. QO denies that genuine atemporality exists.

Background radiation - more properly the cosmic microwave background (CMB)  - is the faint, almost completely uniform background glow,  that is not associated with any star, galaxy, or other object. This glow is strongest in the microwave region of the radio spectrum. It is normally advanced as almost conclusive evidence that he big Bang has taken place.

The Big Bang is the hypothesis that the universe originated in a singularity and then exploded, in the sense that space became progressively more voluminous. It is the prevailing cosmological account of the development of the universe from its initial state until now. The Big Bang theory has no account of how the initial state came to be.

The Big Crunch is a hypothetical event in which the universe contracts until it can contract no further, at which stage it should explode, producing a Big Bang. In Mainstream Science, it is a possible future of our universe.

Biology is the science of life.

The phenomena exhibited by living things.

A black hole is a body of which the gravity is so strong that light cannot escape from it.

We say that situation A causes situation B if:

  1. Situation A has occurred
  2. Situation B has subsequently occurred, as determined in universal quantum time
  3. Situation B would not have occurred if situation A had not occurred.
  4. Given that situation A occurred, situation B was bound to occur.

Note that in this definition we make no principial distinction between material quanta and natural law quanta, for if the universe is a quantum computer, there is no difference. In practice, it is a very useful simplification to take natural law quanta as a given and exclude them from an analysis of causality. 

Christ is, in Christianity, the second person of God, who lived on Earth as Jesus of Nazareth.

The Clump was the state of the universe at the first point in time in which elementary particles were persistently present in it. The Clump is the result of a universal quantum fluctuation in which the total gravitational potential energy - a negative amount - and the total particle energy were equal to zero.

Consciousness is the state of a being in which it is aware of something within or outside of itself.

Constructivism, in the philosophy of mathematics, is the assertion that it is necessary to find or construct a mathematical object in order to prove that it exists. Constructivism rejects proofs in which the existence of a mathematical object is 'proved' by showing that the proposition that it does not exist leads to a contradiction.