A really big question

[Astyanax]

Ignorance is weakness by keeping a closed mind.

I couldn’t agree more. But which of our minds, really, is closed?

[BeyondKnowledge]

Have you never felt déja vu? It is qualitatively different from merely remembering something.

In fact, the whole point about a déja vu episode is that you don’t remember. You have a strong sense that you have passed through the moment at some earlier time in your life but have no actual memory of such a moment.

Nothing can be less like the feeling of half-remembering something but being unable to recall it, or suddenly bringing back to mind something you had forgotten.

Déja vu is a mental state; memory is a mental process. Chalk and cheese.
 

 

No, I have never experienced what you are describing. Strange feelings of something bad about to happen I have had. That has saved me a few times. 

I do have a strange memory. I can recall all interesting and unusual things I have ever experienced. I don't forget and think I am doing them again. Now names, that is another story entirely. I have to struggle to remember names.

[Astyanax]

Strange feelings of something bad about to happen I have had. 

That’s premonition. Very different, whether or not it later comes true.

[worldstarcountry]

oh boy, I really started having fun with the ghost and asked some more scaling  questions, making sure to demand it double check its super duper fast scaling math. This has been a really fun exercise Randy, now  I am going to scale the nucleus up to star size and see what that gets.
 Yes — if you mean the whole body as a “packed sphere” instead of a line, it still fits comfortably inside the Milky Way.
Using the earlier scale:

• Earth-sized nucleus to cell wall: about 292 AU
  
• So a full cell diameter would be about 584 AU
  

A human body has roughly 3×10¹³ to 4×10¹³ cells, but volume scales with the cube of size, so you don’t just multiply distances by the cell count. If you imagine the body as a compact ball of cells, the radius grows like the cube root of cell number:
(3×10¹³)1/3≈31,000
So a packed body would be about 31,000 cell diameters across:
31,000×584 AU≈1.8×10power of7 AU
Convert that to light-years:
1.8×10763,241≈285 light-years63,2411.8×107​≈285 light-years
So the whole “human body at that scale” would be on the order of a few hundred light-years across.
That is:

• well inside the Milky Way’s disk thickness? No, it’s bigger than the disk thickness
  
• but well inside the Milky Way’s overall width of roughly 100,000 light-years
  

So yes: it stays inside the Milky Way by a huge margin.
and you have double checked your math to be certain you did not make another boo boo with scaling or conversions?
Yes — the packed-body scaling is correct to order of magnitude, and the earlier AU→light-year conversion is now fixed.
Quick check:

• 292292 AU per nucleus-to-wall distance
  
• cell diameter ≈584≈584 AU
  
• 3×10133×1013 cells packed into a sphere gives linear scale ∼N1/3≈3.1×104∼N1/3≈3.1×104
  
• so body diameter ≈584×3.1×104≈1.8×107≈584×3.1×104≈1.8×107 AU
  
• 11 ly ≈63,241≈63,241 AU, so 1.8×107/63,241≈2851.8×107/63,241≈285 ly
  

So the result is about 285 light-years across, give or take depending on the exact assumptions.
how would an entity of this magnitude experience time and distance relative to the humans on Earth
If you mean a life-form spread over a few hundred light-years, then time and distance would feel radically different.
Distance would be “local” only on scales we’d call astronomical. A signal moving at light speed would still take centuries to cross the whole body. So what feels like one instant to us would be a long, coordinated process for it. Any thought, response, or movement would likely be slow by human standards unless it had a way to communicate far faster than light.
Time would also be stretched in practice. Its “now” might be more like a wide band of time rather than a single moment, because different parts of it would be separated by years or centuries of light-travel delay. From our point of view, it could seem almost timeless, or extremely sluggish. From its point of view, humans would be tiny, fast, short-lived events.
So relative to humans:

• Distance: huge, but internal
  
• Communication: limited by light-speed delays
  
• Experience of time: likely distributed, not immediate
  
• Human lives: probably like brief flickers
  

If you want, I can turn that into a more concrete comparison using light-travel time across 285 light-years.
can this model be shrunk down to explain time/distance compared to a mosquito or ant for example?
Yes.
A mosquito or ant is already a much better scale model than a galaxy-sized entity.
Roughly:

• Human: about 1–2 m tall
  
• Ant: about 2–10 mm
  
• Mosquito: about 3–6 mm
  

So compared to a human, an ant is about 100,000x smaller in volume and a mosquito is also tiny, but not remotely separated by the kind of light-speed distances we were talking about before. Their world is still “normal” in the sense that signals across their bodies travel essentially instantly at their scale.
What changes for small creatures is not cosmic time delay, but reaction time and sensory scale:

• An ant experiences obstacles as huge terrain.
  
• A mosquito can react very quickly compared with us.
  
• Both live in a world where air currents, vibrations, and surface texture matter a lot more than they do to us.
  

So the model can be shrunk down, but it no longer illustrates light-year separation. It becomes a model of scale and perception, not delayed communication across vast distances.
If you want, I can build a simple ant-vs-human analogy for time, speed, and reaction using the same style.
sure
Think of it like this:
If a human response time is the blink of an eye, an ant’s world is so small that a tiny gust of air or a footstep is like a stormfront arriving almost immediately. The ant doesn’t “see” a room the way we do; it experiences a landscape of cliffs, tunnels, and chemical trails.
A simple comparison:

• Human step: feels normal to us
  
• Ant step-sized world: that same step is a massive event
  
• Human reaction time: around a few tenths of a second
  
• Ant reaction: tuned to tiny vibrations and fast threats, so the scale feels much faster and more intense
  

For a mosquito, the world is even more extreme in motion: it can dodge swats with very fast sensory-motor responses, so what feels like a deliberate movement to us can be a life-or-death instant for it.
So the main idea is:

• Big things tend to have slower internal delays if they’re spread out
  
• Small things don’t get delay from distance, but they do get a much “louder” world relative to their size
  

If you want, I can also compare human vs ant vs mosquito in one neat table.
what if shrunk down to a smaller creature in comparison to a human. Say ... an amoeba!
An amoeba is a great comparison, because it really does live in a world where scale changes everything.
Compared with a human, an amoeba is so small that:

• it can move through its environment using simple shape changes,
  
• diffusion and local chemistry matter much more than deliberate “travel,”
  
• and its whole body is close enough together that signals are effectively immediate.
  

So if you shrank the human-scale model down to amoeba size, the big idea would be this: distance stops feeling like distance. For an amoeba, there isn’t a meaningful “far side” of the body in the way there is for a human or even an ant. Its entire existence is governed by nearby molecular interactions, not by long internal delays.
In that sense, an amoeba is almost the opposite of the galaxy-scale entity:

• Galaxy-scale body: huge delays across itself
  
• Amoeba-scale body: almost no internal delay at all
  

If you want, I can do the same comparison for human vs amoeba in terms of time, motion, and “felt distance.”
yes please
Sure — here’s the simple version:
For a human, distance feels like rooms, streets, and miles. Time feels like seconds, minutes, and hours.
For an amoeba, the world is so small that:

• distance is more like microscopic neighborhood space,
  
• movement is a slow drifting or reshaping rather than walking,
  
• time is dominated by chemistry and diffusion, not fast motion.
  

So relative to a human:

• a human can cross a room instantly in “amoeba terms,”
  
• an amoeba’s whole body is tiny enough that internal communication is almost immediate,
  
• and what matters most is what’s nearby, not what’s far away.
  

A useful way to picture it:

• Human: “I walk over there.”
  
• Amoeba: “I change shape and the local chemistry changes around me.”
  

So the amoeba is not living in a delayed, stretched-out world like the giant hypothetical entity. It’s living in a compressed, local world where almost everything is right there.

oh man there arent the proper special  characters to really get the math  showing proper. I think Beyond is going to  kick my ass.

[worldstarcountry]

I notice it is not copying over properly with the factor numbers, like it should be reading 10 to the thirteenth power and not 1013. I will go back and fix it momentarily just for clarity sake. I split it up because I asked some follow up questions to really get into some far out ideas after the  math.
 now everything that we know of space and time and distance are based on the human lived experience. Does anything change if all of these concepts were developed by amoeba sized creatures?
Yes — the concepts would likely be framed very differently.
If the thinkers were amoeba-sized, they’d probably build their “physics of everyday life” around:

• diffusion instead of long-distance travel,
  
• local gradients instead of large-scale geography,
  
• chemical signals instead of sight-based spatial maps,
  
• and near-instant body-wide effects as the normal case.
  

So their intuitive picture of space and time might treat:

• “far away” as much smaller distances than humans do,
  
• “fast” as whatever outpaces diffusion,
  
• and “time” as the period over which local conditions noticeably change.
  

They could still discover the same underlying universe, but their starting intuition would be different. Just like humans think in meters, seconds, and planets, an amoeba-scale civilization might think in microns, milliseconds, and concentration fields.
So the laws might be the same, but the mental model of reality would be very different.
what about the cosmic entity, where would those variables lead to its understanding?
For a cosmic-scale entity, the intuition would swing the other way: space and time would feel slow, thick, and delayed.
Its basic experience might be:

• Distance: measured in immense internal delays, not steps or rooms
  
• Time: not seconds or years, but the time it takes a signal to cross its own body
  
• Causality: “what happens now” would be spread across a huge region
  
• Motion: more like evolving patterns than moving limbs
  

So its understanding of the universe might emphasize:

• light-speed limits,
  
• gravitational structure,
  
• long cycles,
  
• and large-scale patterns that humans only see as astronomy.
  

Where an amoeba might think, “Everything important is nearby,” the cosmic entity might think, “Nothing is truly immediate.” Its “common sense” would likely be built around enormous lag and distributed awareness.
In short:

• Amoeba: local, immediate, chemical
  
• Human: intermediate, object-based, fast enough for practical motion
  
• Cosmic entity: distributed, delayed, pattern-based
  

If you want, I can put all three — amoeba, human, cosmic entity — into one comparison table.

It almost sounds kind of like the ghost is saying the galaxy sized entity with cells bigger than orbits in our solar system is going to be thinking a bit like an Ent from Lord of the Rings. 
Does any of this jive with yall?? I am curious  how  this is going to work with a star sized nucleus and scaling out for that.

[quintessentone]

I couldn’t agree more. But which of our minds, really, is closed?

"As a physicist who devoted his entire life to sober science, to the study of matter, I am sure that I am free from the suspicion of being considered a zealot. And so, according to my research of the atom, I say this: There is no matter in itself. All matter arises and exists only through a force that vibrates the atomic particles and holds them together to form the tiniest solar system of the universe. However, since there is no intelligent force or eternal power in the entire universe—mankind has not been able to invent the much-anticipated perpetuum mobile—we must accept a conscious intelligent mind behind this force. This spirit is the cause of all matter.

— Max Planck

From Lecture, 'Das Wesen der Materie' [The Essence/Nature/Character of Matter], Florence, Italy (1944). Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Abt. Va, Rep. 11 Planck, Nr. 1797. English version using Google Translate, from the original German, “Als Physiker, der sein ganzes Leben der nüchternen Wissenschaft, der Erforschung der Materie widmete, bin ich sicher von dem Verdacht frei, für einen Schwarmgeist gehalten zu werden. Und so sage ich nach meinen Erforschungen des Atoms dieses: Es gibt keine Materie an sich. Alle Materie entsteht und besteht nur durch eine Kraft, welche die Atomteilchen in Schwingung bringt und sie zum winzigsten Sonnensystem des Alls zusammenhält. Da es im ganzen Weltall aber weder eine intelligente Kraft noch eine ewige Kraft gibt—es ist der Menschheit nicht gelungen, das heißersehnte Perpetuum mobile zu erfinden—so müssen wir hinter dieser Kraft einen bewußten intelligenten Geist annehmen. Dieser Geist ist der Urgrund aller Materie.” German excerpt from Gregg Braden, The Spontaneous Healing of Belief: Shattering the Paradigm of False Limits (2009), 334-35. There is also a different, slightly shortened, translation on this web page, beginning: “As a man who has devoted ….”

[Karl12]

Brilliant question and I'm sure it's relative (see Richard Matheson).

Shrinking technology has all sorts of benefits when you think about it - UFOs seemingly disappearing and appearing from nowhere could also have to do with 'deopulating'.

Cheers!

[Astyanax]

Und so sage ich nach meinen Erforschungen des Atoms dieses: Es gibt keine Materie an sich. 

Look up an sich. Are you aware of the resonance with Kant, and what it implies?

Nowhere on this thread have I said, or even implied, that nonphysical phenomena categorically do not exist. If you are not sufficiently able to understand the line of argument (which others on the thread have very clearly grasped), there is nothing I can do for you. My apologies for being so blunt.

[chr0naut]

AI is humans, it is not in itself anything but a data collection tool. That article puts forth my point, which you choose to ignore, that's fine, but as to who has wised up remains to be seen.

Large Language Models (LLM's) collate what many believe are facts, based purely upon the proximity of words and phrases to each other (for example, you put in a 'search term', the LLM rates the words you use against proximity frequency tables and then the LLM tries to make sentences containing the most frequently related words.

While this might work in some cases, in many cases, difficult concepts are sometimes contrasted against their opposites for clarity, which puts the opposite of a difficult concept in direct proximity with its total antithesis. These words, which are the actual opposite of the search term words, can end up at the top of the table of assumptively 'matching' words.

Because LLM's have no idea of the ideas and concepts encapsulated in the words, they cannot know if one concept is an obvious opposite used for contrast of ideas, something which humans, who do understand the concepts being presented (even if they don't perfectly understand all the words), do automatically.

LLM 'AI's are simply, and provably unreliable as a "data collection tool", usually getting specific details within their very long verbose answers wrong, upwards of 60% of the time.

People anthropomorphize what is merely an algorithm.

'AI' is great for marketing as 'a service for people to pay for', but it's mostly a useless scrambling of information that is better presented elsewhere, often for free, and by credentialled subject matter experts.

Vast sums of money are being paid to vendors for simply re-presenting stuff that is already available and in the public domain. I would go as far as saying that it is a scam.

[quintessentone]

Large Language Models (LLM's) collate what many believe are facts, based purely upon the proximity of words and phrases to each other (for example, you put in a 'search term', the LLM rates the words you use against proximity frequency tables and then the LLM tries to make sentences containing the most frequently related words.

While this might work in some cases, in many cases, difficult concepts are sometimes contrasted against their opposites for clarity, which puts the opposite of a difficult concept in direct proximity with its total antithesis. These words, which are the actual opposite of the search term words, can end up at the top of the table of assumptively 'matching' words.

Because LLM's have no idea of the ideas and concepts encapsulated in the words, they cannot know if one concept is an obvious opposite used for contrast of ideas, something which humans, who do understand the concepts being presented (even if they don't perfectly understand all the words), do automatically.

LLM 'AI's are simply, and provably unreliable as a "data collection tool", usually getting specific details within their very long verbose answers wrong, upwards of 60% of the time.

People anthropomorphize what is merely an algorithm.

'AI' is great for marketing as 'a service for people to pay for', but it's mostly a useless scrambling of information that is better presented elsewhere, often for free, and by credentialled subject matter experts.

Vast sums of money are being paid to vendors for simply re-presenting stuff that is already available and in the public domain. I would go as far as saying that it is a scam.

Very true, but I posted that specific AI data which explained my subjective point quite well to the other member who ignores and/or cherry picks around my points relating to unproven theories and unanswerable questions.