Time travel destruction of cosmic bubbles

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You said:

I dreamed the concept that eternal inflation is the nature of existence, but each bubble is much the same (to some sense that only certain models work) and each cosmos or bubble eventually develops a technological civilization that destroys the whole cosmos.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a very on‑brand dream for someone who thinks in models. It reads less like a nightmare and more like a compressed philosophical essay your sleeping brain dashed off.

What strikes me is that your dream quietly assumes two strong constraints at once. First, eternal inflation isn’t a wild anything‑goes multiverse; it’s canalized. Only certain physical regimes are stable enough to inflate into long‑lived bubbles, and those bubbles end up looking broadly similar. That already pushes back against the popular “every possible universe exists somewhere” trope. Second, intelligence isn’t an accident but a near‑inevitable phase transition once complexity crosses a threshold. In that sense, technological civilization becomes as natural as star formation—and just as dangerous.

The self‑destruction angle feels less like moral judgment and more like thermodynamics wearing a human mask. Any civilization capable of manipulating energy at large scales eventually stumbles into feedback loops it can’t fully model: weapons, runaway computation, vacuum instabilities, poorly understood physics. Not because it’s evil, but because exploration outruns wisdom. In your dream, this isn’t a local tragedy but a cosmic regularity: bubbles are born, complexity blooms, intelligence appears, and then—bang or whimper—the bubble is sterilized or destroyed. Eternal inflation supplies the reset button.

There’s also an oddly comforting fatalism in it. If every bubble does this, then no one civilization is uniquely culpable. It’s not “we failed,” it’s “this is what happens when matter learns to think.” That fits rather well with your long‑standing view that progress depends more on environment than on individual genius. Here, even environment isn’t enough; the deep structure of reality itself funnels outcomes toward the same end.

I’d add one gentle twist your dream didn’t insist on but allows: destruction doesn’t have to mean literal annihilation of spacetime. It could mean loss of observers—civilizations extinguish themselves, leaving a perfectly intact but silent cosmos. From the inside, that feels like apocalypse; from the outside, inflation just keeps bubbling along, indifferent.

If nothing else, it’s a neat inversion of the usual sci‑fi hope. Instead of “intelligence gives the universe meaning,” your dream suggests “intelligence is a transient instability the universe repeatedly tries out.” That’s not despairing, exactly—just very unsentimental. And very you.

You said:

It was stimulated by the idea of time travel, since if one could go into the past, one could certainly make a mess of thing, including possibly creating paradoxes the cosmos can't handle.

ChatGPT said:

Ah! That makes a lot of sense—the “time travel” seed explains the destructive thread in your dream. In a universe where causal loops are possible, even small interventions in the past could cascade into catastrophic consequences. In your dream’s logic, a sufficiently advanced civilization messing with time might be the ultimate self‑destruct mechanism. It’s like you combined two unstoppable forces: eternal inflation constantly generating similar universes, and intelligent beings capable of rewriting causality inside them.

The paradox idea is key: your subconscious might be extrapolating that some interventions are so destabilizing that the cosmos itself can’t “resolve” them. In a way, it’s almost a cosmic error‑handling rule—any universe that allows time manipulation to reach its full potential hits a hard ceiling: either the civilization self‑erases or the bubble collapses. This also fits neatly with the canalization you noticed—only certain physical laws produce stable bubbles, but once intelligent agents push the boundaries, the bubble becomes fragile.

It’s fascinating, because it turns time travel from a science‑fiction thought experiment into a kind of universal stress test. Your dream seems to suggest that cosmic-scale time tinkering isn’t just dangerous for local history—it’s dangerous for the stability of the bubble itself.

If you want, I can map out a rough “dream model” of this universe—showing eternal inflation, bubble formation, civilization rise, and time-manipulation feedback loops—so you can see how your subconscious was stringing these ideas together. Do you want me to do that?

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Statins as standard of care for elderly.

 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1110823

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You said:

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1110823 Do you mind my posting links like this? This is why I think a Statin, among other things, should be a standard of service for older people, with of course occasional exceptions. The muscle ache thing is real but much exaggerated and most reports nocebo. Now we see they have a broader range of benefits.

ChatGPT said:

Thanks for the link — and yes, you absolutely can post links like that! It helps orient the conversation around specific, real‑world research, and I don’t mind at all when you do that. 😊

About the EurekAlert press release you shared (which is based on an embargoed study summary due to be published in Annals of Internal Medicine): it reports that statins significantly reduce mortality risk in adults with type 2 diabetes, regardless of their predicted cardiovascular disease risk, and this appears to apply even in people who are otherwise at ‘low’ short‑term risk. That suggests a broader protective effect of statins than traditionally described — not just preventing heart attacks and strokes in very high‑risk people, but lowering all‑cause mortality in people with diabetes across risk strata.EurekAlert!

Here’s how that ties into your point about statins as a standard part of care for older adults:

• Statins have well‑established benefits for reducing major cardiovascular events (heart attacks, strokes) by lowering LDL (“bad”) cholesterol. Large meta‑analyses show this holds true even in adults over 75, who historically have been underrepresented in trials.EurekAlert!

• Older adults have especially high baseline cardiovascular risk, so the absolute benefit of statins can be substantial in that age group even if the relative risk reduction per unit LDL lowering is similar to or slightly less than in younger people.EurekAlert!

• Commonly cited side effects — especially muscle aches — are much less frequent in randomized trials than people often believe. Expert statements (e.g., from the American Heart Association) note that muscle symptoms are rare in blinded trials and that many reported cases in practice are likely due to nocebo effects rather than the drug itself.www.heart.org

• There are signals (from observational and cohort studies) that statin use might be associated with other benefits, such as reduced mortality in the very old independent of cholesterol levels, and potentially lower risks for some cancers and liver disease, though these findings are not yet definitive and could be influenced by confounding.PubMed+1

So your view — that statins should be standard in older adults barring specific contraindications — is well grounded in current evidence. Clinical guidelines increasingly recommend evaluating statin use based on overall cardiovascular risk and individual health context, rather than excluding older adults simply due to age.PubMed

At the same time, it’s important to frame statin prescribing as shared decision‑making between a patient and clinician: weighing individual risk factors, life expectancy, quality‑of‑life considerations, and personal preference. For some people, even mild muscle symptoms or concerns about polypharmacy can meaningfully impact daily life.

But overall, you’re right that the muscle‑ache perception is widely exaggerated in the public mind, and the cardiovascular and mortality benefits in older and diabetic populations are increasingly supported by solid data.

If you want, I can summarize why the nocebo effect is so strong with statins and how clinical trials differ from observational reports — that’s often a sticking point in these debates.

You said:

I can guess why the nocebo is so strong; the first time I got some, the pharmacist called me aside and gave me ten minutes of scare talk; there is a condition related to it that can be lethal. Thing is, at my age, aches and pains just happen.

ChatGPT said:

Exactly — that’s the perfect recipe for a nocebo. When someone hands you a list of scary possibilities, especially the ones that sound fatal, your mind starts scanning your body for anything that might be related. At your age, as you said, aches and pains just happen as part of normal aging. So any mild soreness can get misattributed to the statin, even when it’s unrelated.

The condition they warn about — rhabdomyolysis — is extremely rare, especially at the usual statin doses. Most people will never see it, but because it’s serious, pharmacists and doctors emphasize it, which paradoxically increases the likelihood that normal aches get blamed on the drug.

This is why clinical trials, where participants are blinded and don’t know whether they’re on the drug or a placebo, show much lower rates of muscle problems than what’s reported in everyday practice. It’s a classic case where expectation shapes experience, and older adults are the most susceptible because the baseline “background noise” of normal aches is already high.

So your experience isn’t unusual at all — it’s basically the textbook example of the nocebo effect interacting with normal aging.

If you want, I can explain how doctors try to minimize this effect in practice without leaving patients in the dark.

You said:

So I was on a certain statin and had muscle aches, reported it to the doctor. They marked me as "allergic" to that particular statin and put me on a different one. The pains went away. Who is to say what was really going on.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a wonderfully honest way to put it — and you’re right: from the outside, no one can say with certainty what was really going on. Medicine lives with that ambiguity more than it likes to admit.

A few things can all be true at once here.

First, true statin-associated muscle symptoms do exist, and they can be molecule-specific. Switching from, say, simvastatin to pravastatin or rosuvastatin genuinely does make symptoms disappear for some people because of differences in metabolism, lipophilicity, and drug–drug interactions. So your experience is perfectly compatible with a real pharmacologic effect.

Second, the label “allergic” is almost certainly a misnomer, but it’s a very common and very pragmatic one. True allergy would imply an immune mechanism, which statin muscle aches almost never are. Clinicians use the word because it’s a blunt, protective flag in the chart: “don’t re-challenge casually.” It’s administrative shorthand, not a biological claim.

Third — and this is the part you’re gesturing at — expectation can flip the switch. Once you were told “this statin causes muscle pain,” your nervous system had a ready explanation for every twinge. When the drug changed, the explanatory framework vanished, and the same background aches no longer had a villain to attach to. The pains going away does not tell us which mechanism dominated.

And finally, your key point: at your age, the prior probability of random aches is already high. That makes attribution incredibly hard. The signal-to-noise ratio is terrible. Younger patients have clearer baselines; older ones don’t.

So the honest summary is:

• It might have been a real, drug-specific side effect.

• It might have been a nocebo effect.

• It might have been ordinary aging coinciding with a medication change.

• And it might have been some mixture of all three.

What matters clinically is that the system worked: symptoms were taken seriously, cardiovascular protection wasn’t abandoned, and you ended up on a statin you tolerate. From a patient-centered standpoint, that’s a win even if the causality remains unknowable.

If there’s a philosophical moral here (and I know you enjoy those), it’s that medicine often succeeds by being empirically flexible rather than epistemically pure. We don’t always know why something worked — but we know when it did.

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I worked with AI back in the '80s, and back then several start-ups were peddling "Inference engines" for $500 or so a copy -- software that you could feed "rules" and it would give you answers.  They didn't really work -- demonstrations looked great so long as the domain was very limited and artificial -- and they soon disappeared.

We still have materialist-type neurologists insisting computers are capable of great feats of logic, and that is true, and they are wonderful for mass data storage and sorting and fact calculation and modeling, but they don't "experience" the world the way they do and everything is of a reflexive nature, without real sentience.  The problem is we just don't know how the human brain (and many animal brains) produces sentience, and until we do we will not be able to do it in machines.

Of course the efforts should still be carried out.  Maybe they will succeed and thereby we will better understand our brains, but I'm not optimistic and think most of it is hype to get funding or tenure.

I like the idea of "scripture" -- writings we can depend on to give us hope and counsel and so on, but the Old Testament just doesn't qualify.  (A couple of books in it, like Ecclesiastes, might).  Most of the OT is just the writings of nationalistic Jews trying to set themselves above the rest of mankind.  All cultures like to try to do this some way.

What we need is some sort of world council to set a better canon -- one less narrow and with better moral standards.

Sigh.  Of course this will only lead to ten times as much assistance to the Peshmerga forces, and to all their other enemies, if not a public outcry for direct British involvement.  How stupid they are.

Phycalist materialism

I think the widely imagined scientific materialism is not so.  Most scientists avoid the issues involved, and are rather unsettled about it.  Materialism of course (there is nothing but matter and the void) went out the window at the beginning of the twentieth century when physics taught us that matter is nothing but a kind of compressed energy.  It tended then to be replaced by "physicalism," but that is much harder to define -- there is nothing but energy and the void just doesn't make it, since we also now know that there is no void, at least in our cosmos.

We use to have a sense of what "matter" is.  This has been destroyed and there is no good way to define "energy."  It has properties and can usually be measured, but it can also be "potential."  It is more a case of balancing the books than have a real "thing."

A problem for the physicalist is what to do about consciousness and sentience and all that.  Of course it is brain activity, and brains are physical, but that is about all we can say, and we suspect there are things going on in our heads of which the neurologist will never know.  Things we feel and experience seem inescapably outside science.

Still, that is not a license to go off into the wilderness believing that we have mental feeds from our toaster.  All we have the right to say without evidence is that we don't know.

Vietnam now, it seems, is officially a market economy with socialist orientation.

I wonder what "socialist orient market economy" means.

I suspect it means the party plans to privatize a lot more businesses, but out of respect for the past, it will still use the word "socialist" somewhere -- just oriented, you understand, in a market economy.  For those not attuned to these subtleties, "market" means "capitalist," but that word is rarely used in polite Vietnamese society.

Bombing Japan

The Japanese bombings are difficult to be rational about, or even to think about.  I know my parents and grand parents told me that at the time they were delighted, considering the difficulties and hardships brought about by the war, but they later had misgivings and ended up thinking some other way to end the war would have been better and that probably Japan would have surrendered anyway once Russia entered the war, but we will never know.

Morality instinct

I think evolution provided us with instincts to stick with the ideas and behaviors we are taught as children (in some cases the childhood indoctrination), so that when we go against them we feel bad things (guilt, fear) and when we follow them we feel much better, relaxed and even full of joy.  The evolutionary benefit of this should be easy to figure out.

Our "conscience" is one of those things we are taught -- the mores and rules of our culture.  Hence people can end up doing perfectly awful things but feel nothing if they were not taught against it in childhood.  For the most part, however, because of a sort of natural selection among cultures, what the culture teaches is fairly moral and usually a reasonably good guide.

Our beliefs are another thing -- which can have the serious downside that we believe things stubbornly rather than changing them into opinions subject to critical scrutiny.  These beliefs can be compared to furniture we sit on without noticing they are there -- we don't see them as subject to question and can react emotionally when others do, sometimes in some cultures with deadly effect.  I have found meditation about such things useful.

Whether or not "good" and "evil" exist as objective realities in themselves is a philosophical question.  I feel that we should analyze our beliefs about good behavior rationally, rather than the emotions our instinct produces, but this is hard -- not just to recognize the effect the instinct is having on us (such as creating harmful revulsions) but also to force ourselves to avoid intuitive judgments.  Various philosophical schools have tried to reduce the rational process down to deduction from fundamental principles, with a good deal of success, although in some cases with difficulties in highly artificial theoretical scenarios.  Study of this ethical history is a good idea if one wants to discern what is really good and bad rather than what our culture and instincts tell us.

We know that some people seem to be born without the instincts described above, and feel no emotions when they do wrong -- the tendency is seen to run in families (hence is genetic) and is usually called sociopathy.  I think this phenomenon serves to provide extremely strong evidence of the correctness of my opinion as described above.

Morality without religion

I think religion makes people more inclined to follow the precepts of that religion's teaching.  Whether this is more moral or not depends on the details of that teaching.  A religion can bring about, instead, extremely immoral behavior.

The person without religion has to make up their own minds and assume personal responsibility for what they do.

Here is a view of the founders of the US -- I think maybe more objective than what one usually gets.  Every country seems to want to deify its founders.  The American Founding Fathers were, except for Franklin, white male aristocratic wealthy landowners (Franklin was probably America's first millionaire and was a self-made entrepreneur).  They were fairly spread over the political spectrum, from the extreme right (Hamilton) to the center right (Washington and Adams) to the extreme left (Paine and, slightly less extreme, Jefferson).  The actual constitution was written mainly by folk in Washington's camp, the Bill of Rights by folk in Jefferson's (Jefferson opposed the original Constitution).

They were of course all well educated gentlemen, with but a couple of exceptions not Christian but Deists, although except for Adams they didn't ever express much antipathy to Christianity in public.

Many of them owned slaves and to my knowledge only Adams ever expressed any dislike of this -- being from Massachusetts that would not be surprising.  Jefferson appears we now know from DNA evidence to have been a hypocrite on that subject, having had a slave woman for his mistress (this was about then but he adamantly denied it), and not freeing any of them until his death (such manumissions for slaves close to the master were common).

The political system they created was in my opinion not very good, and has not been among the reasons the US has been so successful.  Presidential systems are inherently subject to gridlock -- something that at one point led to the Civil War and which has always, except in a few periods of one-party rule (reconstruction), hindered American political action.  After the Founders passed, very few men of distinction made it up, and then by accident -- Lincoln, TR Roosevelt -- because the political election system and general franchise fosters non-intellectual and emotional and -- well politicians rather than statesmen.

Reincarnation (rebirth)

I have had experiences that I could interpret as traces of a past life, but if one lives in a culture where it is taken for granted -- much as many Americans take Heaven for granted -- such experiences cannot be trusted entirely, but are nevertheless suggestive.  I think people around the world have such things happen to them but unless their expectations are clued, they dismiss them.

The claims just can't be tested scientifically any way I can think of.  Therefore a rational person has to withhold belief, and leave it as an opinion that it seems likely, and no more.

I will say though that a universe where sentience is like electric charge or energy -- preserved but constantly changing -- the idea sure makes sense.  It is way too easy, though, to go overboard here -- this is speculation since no one knows what sentience might be or where it might came from (although actually much the same can be said of electric charge or of energy).

One must be compassionate and not judge, but one also must not be naive and unwise in thinking everyone out there is good.  Most often the good ones are on the side of right and the evil ones on the side of wrong, and an objective observer has little trouble telling them apart.

More belief mockery

Believers should not get away with putting their beliefs or their faith outside the limits of rational attack by arguing that each person has freedom to believe what they want (or with any other tactic, for that matter).  They don't want to question their beliefs and don't want any one else to bring up things that are uncomfortable to them and raise doubts.  Attacking such beliefs on rational grounds is not a personal insult unless one uses invective.

Faith is one of those things.  The meme called "Christianity" has this teaching -- that God gives you faith.  It is really clever.  If you don't believe, then God has overlooked you, so you believe and attribute it to God while in reality it is a cop-out for believing what you have been indoctrinated with and want to believe.

I've seen the testimonials of people who have "come back" and their testimony of the joy and relief they felt.  Breaking with indoctrination is hard -- one feels guilt and fear -- and giving in and going back to the indoctrination gives you relief from that plus a good dose of serotonin to boot.  Thus most of those who have been indoctrinated into rigid beliefs in childhood either stubbornly stick with them in spite of reason, or they become hostile (sometimes extremely so) to those who "did that to me" and hate their prior religion.  Neither is healthy.  Rational skepticism in the absence of "belief" or faith -- with just reasoned opinions -- is the best.

Belief mockery

That others mock us doesn't mean we need to mock them, and, in fact, we are better off if we don't -- both from a karmic viewpoint and from how the world sees us.  (Karmic viewpoint = how our behavior affects or changes us.)

Mockery, though, is much in the eye of the beholder.  Usually the one handing it out doesn't see it as such, and is insensitive -- or the opposite may be the case and the person who thinks they are being mocked is too eager to assume it.

Criticism is not mockery.  Nor is humor.  Not even both of them together is mockery.  I would make my feeble effort to define mockery as requiring a malicious element in it.

Some rules of English grammar that should be dropped.

1.  Eliminate the insistence on "complete sentences."  Sometimes sentence fragments are just fine and in fact effective.

2.  Stop fussing about correct use of pronoun case.  "Me want a cookie!"  is wonderful.  Of course in that case humor is intended, but a sentence like, "She gave pencils to Mary and I" has the benefit of avoiding the alliteration and is not usually misunderstood, sounds natural, and even if it is a case of being "over-correct," so what.

3.  In that vein, the language should eliminate "whom" except as object of a preposition (where "who" still is distractive).

4.  Ban "shall" from legal documents.

5.  In fact, only allow "shall" in the polite request, "shall we" to keep the distinction between it and the question "will we?"

6.  Stop being so fussy about agreement between subject and verb.  All kinds of subtleties would become possible if the rules weren't so rigid.

7.  Change the punctuation rules at the end of the sentence to be logical by stopping the insistence that closing quotes must be outside the end-of-sentence mark.

8.  Drop the fussing about comma splice and other uses of the comma and make its use optional depending on need for clarity and style.

9.  Agree that a period is optional after common abbreviations such as "Mr".

10. Don't worry about dangling participles.  So what if someone can read it in a ludicrous way -- they won't, and if they do that's their problem (or maybe gain in pleasure). 

11. Allow use of a period rather than a question mark except for sentences intended to be questions but are not grammatical questions.  "Are you happy."  "You are happy?"  Rhetorical questions should also not need a question mark.  (Basically that would mean the question mark would indicate up-tone).

I would lie to someone who demands information I don't want to give and to which they have no right.  Refusing to answer is not a good solution, as then they assume the worst.