Of course I dont think that even we can talk about change,changing in time is not equal to variation in space,so change of field with regard to spatial coordinates is not change at all. There is another point that even many experts couldn't or don't want to believe , if universe at the most fundamental ontological level is described by something such as no-boundary proposal of Hartle-Hawking or tunneling from nothing model of Vilenkin universe absolutely has neither a beginning point (beginning in the sense of geometric or thermodynamic) nor is beginningless ( cyclic/biuncing models,time-loop model and all past infinite models) but is timeless,causality-less ,changeless and spaceless and indeed is a mathematical structure.

beginninglessness indeed in both above mentioned theories universe is timeless,causality-less,changeless and spaceless mmmodel model

In fact, the way field equations defined in Euclidean signature usually work, their solutions are usually analytic, meaning that you can reconstruct the field everywhere if you know the value of the field in any finite sized region, however small. That's quite different from what happens in Lorentzian signature (+++-), where you can modify the fields independently in different locations, and it can't affect you in any way until you wait long enough for a signal to arrive. This is the "causality" property of Lorentzian field theories.

So if as far as I understand the issue if signature of spacetime be Euclidean ( ++++) we can definitely and surely say there is no any possible notion of causality,time and change ,indeed 4D Euclidean pure space is necessarily and absolutely A-causal ( Causality-free) ,timeless and changeless , am I right ?

Cheers,
Kaveh

(Usually when you ask an expert what you think is a simple yes-no question, they hem and haw and eventually say "it depends". Part of becoming an expert is learning the language in which is easiest to formulate the right questions; that's why it's so hard to translate.)

1. Yes, the concept of "distance in space" and "duration in time" are different; the first applies to points which are spacelike separated and the second to points which are timelike separated. There exist ways to meaningfully distinguish between spacelike and timelike given our laws of physics (e.g. there are 3 space dimensions but only one time, some stuff travels slower than light (i.e. in timelike directions) but nothing we know about travels faster than light (i.e. in spacelike directions). In other words, there is no symmetry which flips the notions of distance and duration. (Although you might be able to cook up alternative laws of physics which have a space/time flipping symmetry, like a 1+1 dimensional world with only massless particles so everything moves at the speed of light.)

2. On the other hand, there is no absolute meaning to picking out one particular direction of time as special, or a 3D plane of 3 particular space directions as special. That's because there IS a symmetry which mixes up the time coordinates and space coordinates, the Lorentz boost. See The Ten Symmetries of Spacetime. However, this symmetry does not ever allow you to turn a spacelike direction into a timelike direction. It does allow you to do things like tilt a spacelike direction "timeward" so that it is angled a bit in the time direction, but not so much that it becomes timelike.

When we say that spacetime is unified, we mean (2) and not (1).

3. Is 1990 (on earth) 23 lightyears away? I think it's probably best to think of this as a pure convention. Distance is not duration. However, nothing stops us from using "natural units" where the speed of light $c = 1$. This amounts to measuring time and space using the same units (say years = lightyears) and then it would be quite literally true that 1990 is 23 units away from us.

On the other hand, nothing stops us from being perverse and adopting units instead where $c = \sqrt{\pi}/3$. The equations will look uglier, but all the physics will be the same. In that convention, if we keep lightyears as the unit, it's not going to be true that 1990 is 23 units away. It's just a question of how you choose to measure.

I apologize for having offended you. I regret this; it was not my intention. Please forgive me.

However, you have been much ruder to me than I have been to you. If you go back and reread your comments, I think you will see that. You may prefer open rudeness, but as the moderator of this blog I do not. I think I agree with you that this particular conversation should end here.

Best wishes,
Aron

I already gave you the contradictory premisses of democracy -- that it assumes a man is fit to rule himself while assuming he must also be ruled. If you require simplification of why this is a contradiction, or how it applies to democracy, I am not interested in explaining it.

"'Democracy is false' is a meaningless statement, because democracy is a system rather than a proposition."

The practise can neither be true nor false, but it can be inconsistent, and that inconsistency can be rooted in a self contradiction present in the assumptions upon which the system is founded.

"As a "Christian, and an ethical man", I am indeed horrified by your suggestion that it is acceptable to murder a "person so hated that nobody -- not friends, family, business associates, or neighbours -- would seek redress for their death". Just because someone is disliked or friendless doesn't mean that they ought to be murdered."

I was discussing criminality, not acceptability. Even if it were doing the world a favour, it might still be morally wrong -- but it would not be a crime. While you might consider the law to be a moral authority, you should know better than to expect other people to adhere to your religious beliefs.

In other words, don't put words in my mouth. I illustrated why it wasn't necessarily a crime to kill someone, without treating the general question, "Is un-provoked killing immoral?"

"In any case, there are practical matters involved as well. I myself have been friends with homeless people, and for the most part it is very difficult to keep track of their whereabouts. If one of them were to die in a back alley, I would probably never know about it. I certainly wouldn't hire a private detective to gather evidence just because I hadn't seen the guy recently (and if he has fellow homeless friends, they cannot afford to do so). Try applying a little bit of scepticism to your own ideas, not just the current system!"

The point of law is to treat known injustice, not to make injustice impossible: that would require morally perfect humans. A missing persons investigation might similarly operate at the behest of a concerned individual -- to address your supposedly 'practical' concern. That is how it works now, after all -- so if it is a practical problem with my idea, it is a practical problem in the current system too.

"There was a low reported crime rate; that doesn't mean the crime rate was actually low."

I'm 100% certain the "crime rate" was sky high -- just look at all those people . . . building things, doing things, having control over their own lives -- all without a permit!

Or maybe you meant the kind of rampant violence which would have reduced the city to ashes in a week. I have news for you: it lasted a lot longer than a week. If you want an idea what uncontrolled violence looks like, look at the ghettos of any large city: gunfire between tower-style residential complexes controlled by rival street gangs, which fail to escalate into outright warfare only because the surrounding government would bring in the military if they did. If the violence in Kowloon had been of that magnitude, particularly in the absence of gov't control, it would not have gone unrecorded, and the city would not have lasted anywhere near the time it did.

" If it was unsafe for large groups of police, surely it was also unsafe for ordinary people"

There are many places where you may go as a citizen, which are openly hostile to law enforcement -- because law enforcement is, at best, a capricious force which may or may not be acting in the interest of justice at that moment, but certainly is there to stir shit up.

Put another way, as a LEO, one represents a system of interests which are easily identified -- and may be in opposition to the group upon whom they are intruding; in that case, they are immediately identifiable as opponents to that group, whereupon an unaffiliated individual presents no threat whatsoever.

Besides: even if it might be unsafe for you or I to go to such a place, doesn't mean it's unsafe for the citizens thereof. You have no right (moral, practical, ethical, or even religious) to assert that you may go wherever you wish, welcome or not, and intrude upon other people's societies--and they have the right to treat you like an invader and attack you accordingly if you do, just like you have the moral right (I have no idea if it's legal in California to defend one's home) to defend your property from intruders and thieves--even to the point of killing them.

"I don't doubt that the ordinary people stuck together and helped each other as best they could under such poor circumstances. But that doesn't mean it was ideal. For a person who is so skeptical of police, you seem strangely optimistic about the behavior of organized crime (the actual rulers of the Kowloon Walled City according to the article)."

If you may be sceptical of the "reported crime rate" for the city, then surely you'll understand that I'm suspicious of reports which assert "organised crime" rules a city where most of its inhabitants were undoubtedly engaging in some crime of some fashion -- unlicensed buildings, unlicensed water and utilities, probably saying and doing *all kinds* of things the state didn't approve of . . . by definition, the entire city operated as a "criminal organisation" -- which would, although technically accurate in a certain sense, render the description rather circular.

Within the "lawless" context of the city, the various organisations were merely capitalist enterprises protecting their interests -- which is exactly how corporations in the US operate, too -- except we export our murder to sweatshops and little known villages in other countries where it's not as liable to make the news. How is that preferable?

The point, by the way, isn't that the city was paradise -- it's that the city functioned, and damned well considering its lack of resources and tiny size. And all without the bureaucratic overhead of a government. I'd bet you almost anything, though, that it was safer to be in that city than to visit a lot of parts of supposedly "governed" cities, American or otherwise.

"In any case, police (and some government to appoint them) are necessary even in the system you propose, where people can sue murderers. Someone needs to haul the murderer into court and enforce the punishment."

Keep your ideas straight. I proposed two things: a workable alternative to the way our current political system operates (which would, functionally, work exactly the same -- do you think cops REALLY investigate your homeless friend, beaten to death in the alley, in this current system?) except without the pretence; and that such "systems" were more trouble than they were worth and actually CREATED crime -- which they then used as justification for their own existence. Don't make the mistake of thinking these are the same idea.

"All systems involve flawed people. Every one! So how can this be a criticism of democracy when it applies to every alternative as well? What specific system would you propose as an alternative to democracy? I guarantee you it will also involve flawed people. I also suspect it may have been tried for considerably less than 200 years."

I didn't say this should prevent us from trying new systems -- at least, by the way, I am honest in my condescension toward you, and actually have a reason for it; you merely encode yours into disingenuous replies which really have nothing to do with what I said -- I said that you are positively comparing democracy to things like monarchy, without enough data to make a valid comparison.

"Yes they can. There are things called Revolutions and Constitutual[sic] Amendments. However, they require a certain amount of popular support. This is a good thing, otherwise crankish people would try to change things every 10 years."

I have watched -- both in my own lifetime and through the lense of history -- several revolutions occur around the world. The success rate is pathetically low, even in the case of substantial popular support. The reason being, of course, that the same ruling class which controlled gov't A will almost invariable come to control gov't B, generally by gaining traction in the revolutionist camp by offering them the support needed to overthrow the 'oppressors'.

Even in America, in that revolution, the story was much the same -- the honeymoon period lasted a little longer than it did in the Leninist revolution, sure, but the same inexorable process happened in both places. America even has its own private little Gulag -- called Guantanamo, and that's the one we, the uninformed public, know about because someone squealed. How many other internment camps exist? I don't have clearance for that information, and neither do you. It *might* be zero, but America's track record suggests otherwise -- it is reasonable to assume a criminal who commits a crime once will commit it again.

As for your assertion that 'crankish' (I trust that adjective was not directed at me; if it was, it compounds what I say below) people would change everything every 10 years -- perhaps that would be better: then we'd have a higher chance of stumbling upon a working system preferable to the one we have now. As it stands, we operate like the old bush fire fighters with the zero-burn policy -- keep putting out little fires until an unstoppable inferno breaks loose. Is that really an intelligent way to run ANY dynamic system?

Remember: "Those who admire the massive, rigid bone structures of dinosaurs should remember that jellyfish still enjoy their very secure ecological niche."

"You seem to have put some unnecessary insults into your comment. It is not childish to believe that sometimes rules are necessary to keep people safe, and that regrettably this sometimes means sometimes enforcing rules even when no harm occured, if the net effect of always enforcing the rule is good. At least, most adults seem to agree with me rather than with you."

It is childish to think that rules for the sake of rules are an intelligent, useful, or helpful notion. That is different from intelligent rules which rarely (or never) apply in the case where there was no potential harm.

Again, to use your example of traffic controls, it is vastly different to pull over a car which blows through a busy intersection during rush hour (an obviously reckless manoeuvre) and to pull over a car who rolls through a stop sign at 3:00 AM at a deserted intersection -- so while a rule against reckless driving makes sense (if it's not reckless it's not a crime, regardless of particulars), a rule against a specific activity which may or may not be dangerous at a given time is NOT.

A much better example, by the way, would have been building code -- particularly fire safety code, which I agree with in the context of crowded building environments, where one building going up in flames can take down an entire city block. (Note that the same fire code does NOT make sense in areas where the only building at risk is the one thus constructed -- if I personally wanted to live in a tinderbox full of gunpowder and open flames, and it wouldn't hurt anyone else, nobody has any business telling me I shouldn't.)

The difference should be obvious -- a building which is a fire hazard is ALWAYS a fire hazard, and if that hazard affects other buildings, then there is an onus of responsibility on the owner to mitigate such risk. However, running a red light is STRICTLY a case-by-case scenario, where the particulars will unilaterally determine if it presented a risk to other people or not.

And since you haven't bothered to do your homework:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061110/011804.shtml
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html
http://www.dw.de/european-towns-remove-traffic-signs-to-make-streets-safer/a-2143663

Hopefully these links will do some good, but I've lost interest in conversing with you. I don't expect you to agree with me, but if you're going to disagree, I do expect you to do it intelligently. I don't even care if you're rude, as long as you are rude openly. I expect you to think -- because you have proven in other posts that you are capable of thought, and I wouldn't have bothered posting at all if you hadn't. But you instead were careless, sloppy, and insulted me, all in your first reply -- and that little ad hominem about "disagreeing with Никто" is beneath contempt.

I don't think you know what logically self-contradictory means. It means that a proposition is necessarily false in every logically possible set of circumstances. That's just what the term means. It is not the sort of thing which depends on "cultural context" (except through the definitions of words); if a proposition is self-contradictory then this can be shown by pure reason without using any empirical evidence whatsoever. For example, "George is both a man and not a man", if "man" is taken to mean the same thing in both parts of the sentence. We don't need to know anything about George to know that this sentence is false.

It does not and cannot apply to things like "democracy" and "the criminal justice system", because these are not the sort of things that can be true or false. "Democracy is false" is a meaningless statement, because democracy is a system rather than a proposition. Democracy may be a good system or a bad system, but if it is a bad idea, it is not because it is self-contradictory, but because some other specific practicable system can be shown to be better. Democracy (like almost any other system) has some good points and other bad points. You seem to be too much of an absolutist to recognize this fact.

As a "Christian, and an ethical man", I am indeed horrified by your suggestion that it is acceptable to murder a "person so hated that nobody -- not friends, family, business associates, or neighbours -- would seek redress for their death". Just because someone is disliked or friendless doesn't mean that they ought to be murdered.

In any case, there are practical matters involved as well. I myself have been friends with homeless people, and for the most part it is very difficult to keep track of their whereabouts. If one of them were to die in a back alley, I would probably never know about it. I certainly wouldn't hire a private detective to gather evidence just because I hadn't seen the guy recently (and if he has fellow homeless friends, they cannot afford to do so). Try applying a little bit of skepticism to your own ideas, not just the current system!

Just because there are some situations where good behavior can be enforced without rules, doesn't mean that all circumstances are like this. From the wikipedia article you cite, the Kowloon Walled City does not sound like a place that I would want to live. There was a low reported crime rate; that doesn't mean the crime rate was actually low. Who would bother to report crimes to the police if the police are afraid to enter, and don't have effective control over the territory? As the wikipedia article says, "The Walled City had become such a haven for criminals that police would venture into it only in large groups." If it was unsafe for large groups of police, surely it was also unsafe for ordinary people. I don't doubt that the ordinary people stuck together and helped each other as best they could under such poor circumstances. But that doesn't mean it was ideal. For a person who is so skeptical of police, you seem strangely optimistic about the behavior of organized crime (the actual rulers of the Kowloon Walled City according to the article).

In any case, police (and some government to appoint them) are necessary even in the system you propose, where people can sue murderers. Someone needs to haul the murderer into court and enforce the punishment.

So you would compound this problem by making flawed laws enforced by flawed people?

All systems involve flawed people. Every one! So how can this be a criticism of democracy when it applies to every alternative as well? What specific system would you propose as an alternative to democracy? I guarantee you it will also involve flawed people. I also suspect it may have been tried for considerably less than 200 years.

More importantly, systems cannot be beheaded.

Yes they can. There are things called Revolutions and Constitutual Amendments. However, they require a certain amount of popular support. This is a good thing, otherwise crankish people would try to change things every 10 years.

You seem to have put some unnecessary insults into your comment. It is not childish to believe that sometimes rules are necessary to keep people safe, and that regrettably this sometimes means sometimes enforcing rules even when no harm occured, if the net effect of always enforcing the rule is good. At least, most adults seem to agree with me rather than with you.

Nor is it the sin of Pride to disagree with Никто (although it may be Pride to believe that disagreeing with Никто is Pride).

"The victim's family could sue in court, but what if the victim doesn't have any family (or their family didn't like them)? For this reason the State has an official prosecutor who acts on behalf of the victims. That way, justice for wrongful death is not just for the rich and well-connected, but for everybody."

It is arguable that a killing person so hated that nobody -- not friends, family, business associates, or neighbours -- would seek redress for their death is in fact doing the world a favour. I don't expect you to agree with that point itself, but having been both well-off and a street rat, I can tell you with confidence that even the lowliest homeless beggar may have friends, if he is worth befriending, even if they are no more powerful than he -- and those friends are often far more loyal than those with money. As long as a means of redress were available, they would make use of it -- so the solution is to make a means available.

In other words, make prosecution for such crimes a state-operated affair -- so that money or standing is not a deterrent to anyone seeking redress -- but an affair which only happens at the behest of some (even vicariously) injured party. The inconceivably rare case -- of a man who may be a good man but is mourned by no-one, is so unlikely that it should be dismissed from consideration -- and CERTAINLY not used as the basis for creating a flatly self contradictory legal representation of ethics.

"Another good example is running a red traffic light. This risks causing great harm, but if you happen to miss the oncoming traffic then no specific individual was harmed. Nevertheless, it makes sense to punish it in ALL cases, not just the ones where people get hurt. That way people won't do it, and everyone is safer."

This is a terrible example. Stop lights and stop signs are actually detrimental to safety (look up the case studies of unmarked roads in certain European cities) -- and even if they were an asset, that would not make them infallible.

There are many cases -- probably at least one every time anyone who isn't in an utterly grid-locked city goes driving -- where the light is against them, but there would be no risk in running it. Zero. None.

Consequently, running a red light is, without an element of recklessness (failing to account for opposing traffic, in other words), not a crime -- and treating it as a crime is the precise kind of "rules for the sake of rules" balderdash which is the antithesis of a liberated society.

So let me reiterate that abstract justice is self contradictory, and add that the idea of a "victimless crime" is so utterly and obviously flawed that any child can see it -- it takes years of brain washing for adults to buy into something so flatly insane.

"Now, you may think that modern legal systems have too many crimes, or that they prosecute them in ways that don't always make sense. And I would agree, but to say that criminal law is inherently unethical in all cases is just silly."

In the case of the latter, I said nothing of the sort -- in many cases it is, by coincidence, the correct action; the principle is unethical, even when the practise is not. In the case of the former, that goes without saying.

"Similarly, to say that democracy is inherently self-contradictory is absurd. Deciding who will rule us by majority vote is not like a square circle, in fact considering that democracy is strictly speaking a procedure (rather than a proposition that can be true or false) I'm not sure it even makes sense to call it a contradiction."

It is logically inconsistent; that makes it self contradictory -- it expresses a contradiction in terms.

And aside from begging the question, you have not illustrated why it is absurd to say that it is self contradictory. More to the point, you have not illustrated that it is consistent -- and neither has anyone else I have seen, and not for a lack of looking.

"People need to be governed by laws because they are not perfect. In a democracy, these same imperfect people choose who makes the laws. Therefore, they will also make mistakes in voting. Duh! No one ever promised you the system would work perfectly. The best argument for democracy is not that we are completely fit to rule ourselves, but that any smaller aristocratic group is even less fit to rule us. Someone has to do it. You know the joke, "democracy is the worst system of government except for all the other ones"."

So you would compound this problem by making flawed laws enforced by flawed people? That is a strange solution: compounding one error with another -- two flawed premisses do not make a correct assertion, much as two drunks do not make a straight line.

The system does not work at all. The only places I have seen which were reliably civilised, safe, and sane were all highly rural and entirely self governed. The local constabulary, inasmuch as it existed at all, functioned exclusively in the capacity I described above: to deal with the potential case where someone was shot and the family felt it wasn't an innocent hunting accident -- but I never heard of that actually happening, not in 20 years of living there.

Nobody stole. Nobody lied. Nobody got hurt, except by accident. Nobody had to get a permit to build a new house. Nobody worried about cops breaking in their door at night. Nobody went to jail -- we didn't even have a jail within 30 miles. Nobody locked their doors.

You might engage in some hand-waving about population density or whatnot -- but this also worked in a city context, in the Kowloon Walled City -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City#Culture -- it isn't cops which keep people in line, it's people who keep people in line. You should know that; you're not a child.

People -- and again, I am disappointed to see you making this basic mistake -- seem to have conflated the failings of society with the failings of ruling structure. While it is true that an insane and depraved monarch, for example, might make his subjects' lives a living hell, his insanity is limited to him. Cut off his head and the replacement may or may not be worse -- but he can be replaced.

Democracy replaces the monarch with a system -- an individual elected by all of us, but none of us are held accountable for our decision. More importantly, systems cannot be beheaded. You cannot cut the head off a democracy; even if you impeach the president and replaced all of congress, the ruling impetus of the system is decentralised; in effect you would change very little.

So now we have replaced a broken system with an unfixable system -- this is like buying a car which can't be repaired at a mechanic, and bragging it's better than the old junker you traded in, while it only has 10,000 miles on it. We have had thousands of years to see the failings in the alternatives, but only 200 years to see the failings of democracy -- and you think yourself wise enough to compare the two?

I suggest you read about the sin of Pride and get back with me.