Hollow Sun

Blue Magic Kittens Suck

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 08:45:00 -0700

I can not believe that Blue Magic kittens are so popular these days, as they are obviously not real, the wrong colour and I have yet to see any evidence that they are magical at all.

Blue Magic Kittens just simply do not exist - and are quite obviously inferior to the real rulers of animal magicians, Yellow Wizard Frogs.

Yellow Wizard Frogs and smaller, yellowed beings that possess more magical energy in their distended bellies than a silly blue kitten would even if it tried very very hard. As such, please can everyone stop banging on about kittens, blue or of any variety, and instead sort me out a cup of tea and a Wispa pronto.

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The Evolution of our Intuition

Sat, 28 May 2011 11:09:00 -0700

I've been interested recently in how intuition falls within human evolution - what possible mechanisms could exist that could be naturally selected for, and what the possible future may bring up as technology evolves alongside us (or is using us to evolve)

Clare from Metalife has also written about this area recently on the Metalife blog, which examines how to tune into pre-cognition to help in day to day life

Intuition's Present Situation

What is intuition? It has had several attempts at definition, from Jung's "perception via the unconscious" to Henri's Bergson's definition of a "simple, indivisible experience of sympathy, through which one is moved into the inner being of an object to grasp what is unique and ineffable within it". Perhaps the simplest explanation is that it is a set of common sense beliefs we all recognise but can't necessarily justify.

What is clearer is that some people have more intuition than others, although most people have it to a degree. Intuition is generally regarded as a feminine trait, and is generally useful for those who have it.

For me, intuition comes up often whilst looking at problems to solve - at some point everything just falls into place and you know you've found the solution without even needing to check. This, I think, is linked to what is often spoken of in physics/maths - that certain equations are "beautiful": they hold so many truths in such an elegant way they are recognised as correct. Whilst intuition seems easy when it arrives, it generally favours those who have been practising or working hard at a problem for a long time - they have complete mastery of the foundations. I think this is an important part of the puzzle - giving your subconscious enough material to make leaps beyond your conscious thought, and hints at subconscious problem solving, such as when asleep.

The idea intuition is a feminine trait I believe comes from what most people see day to day as the most useful form of intuition, when dealing with people - women are generally more communicative and network more than men, and so that mastery can come to the fore more in recognising subtle signals and signs when reading people.

Where things get stickier is when signals that could lead to leaps of intuition seem further removed from the present situation - where a form of pre-cognition seems to be working to give insights. Almost all religious belief could fall under this category, where no evidence is needed for those to hold deep faiths in various dogmas.

From a practical viewpoint, being intuitive is advantageous - I would class myself as an intuitive person and a large part of my current success. I would even say I do not listen to it as much as I should do - thinking back to those situations where hindsight showed I should have trusted my intuition, I'd say perhaps denial or fears stopped me from believing what was immediately obvious otherwise. Keeping aware of these opportunities and trusting your instincts seems to always result in a better life - perhaps because a poorer life would be one with regrets about what you felt you should have done.

How did we get here?

A good point made by Clare in the Metalife post is that intuition would be evolutionary favoured - if any mechanism exists that can be selected for then that will be favoured. A good example of this can be applied to the evolution of language (and therefore consciousness?)

As this Harvard PHD student puts it (Sharon Barry):

Suppose:

People can recognize vixens by seeing them or by hearing others say vixen

People can recognize foxes by seeing them or by hearing others say fox, and they have fox hunting/evasion procedures

There would be survival value to going to get your fox spear directly when someone says vixen rather than waiting for someone to say that is a fox too, or waiting for it to come into sight.

Since language changes so quickly it’s unlikely that there would be benefit in making a brain that ‘automatically’ believes that vixens are foxes.

But there would be a benefit to build a brain which is likely to connect these kinds of states (one that treats these states as inductive).

We would be evolved to have a sense of the ‘right’ kinds of inferential procedures to accept as universally true after relatively few confirmatory experiences, just as we are evolved to have a sense of the ‘right’ kind of generalizations about the empirical world (pots that look like this will crack when fired, treating bees like this will make them aggressive) to believe on the basis of very limited experience.

In this way our intuition that the pigeon-hole principle is true is like our intuition that you can’t cut a banana with a telephone wire (we are evolved to quickly, subconsciously, make certain kinds of generalizations on the basis of very limited observation)

Nature using quantum effects

The above looks at how we can make leaps of judgement, but could it go deeper than that? What if bigger leaps can be made taking advantage of the quantum mind that is postulated may be the only way to explain consciousness fully? Nature and evolution have already shown that it will use quantum effects if possible, examples including photosynthesis using quantum effects to get near 100% energy to chemical efficiency and birds using entangled atoms in their eyes as a way to navigate

Could properties such as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle give our minds access to information further forward in time than the present moment? Could the smearing out of cause and effect that is prevalent in the classical world not be adhered to by the electrical impulses running through a human mind?

Evidence is starting to gather that this may be the case - in Nov 2010 Daryl Bem, Professor of Psychology at Stanford, published a paper publishing details of experiments he had carried out on over 1000 students ( New Scientist story here )

From the NS story:

In one experiment, students were shown a list of words and then asked to recall words from it, after which they were told to type words that were randomly selected from the same list. Spookily, the students were better at recalling words that they would later type.

In another study, Bem adapted research on "priming" – the effect of a subliminally presented word on a person's response to an image. For instance, if someone is momentarily flashed the word "ugly", it will take them longer to decide that a picture of a kitten is pleasant than if "beautiful" had been flashed. Running the experiment back-to-front, Bem found that the priming effect seemed to work backwards in time as well as forwards.

How pre-cognition could work out

If this is found to be the case, it will blow the door on many rationalists and re-examine how human beings interact with the world around it. If we could have some pre-cognition on what is going to happen, could we be to blame for events that happen to us? If we can pre-cognate, can we change what we see happen? Does this mean other concepts such as collective consciousness also exist? If the future can be affected, could the past also? How does this sit with the arrow of time?

If intuition is tied to our methods of communicating, a large factor in this evolution will be the World Wide Web - already the web is affecting how we work and think - could it also affect what we predict and intuit?

With increased communication and shared pre-cognition, more shared intuitions could occur, more group mind beliefs - and perhaps more control over what will happen to us as a species. Perhaps that is what has been happening throughout history already - we've just been too dimly aware to know of our real power, or that power has been in the hands of the most influential such as bankers and politicians. If so, then the future may represent a world where the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, which sounds like a positive evolution for us as a species.

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No one understands reality

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 13:27:00 -0800

I've been reminded by a BBC Horizon programme recently how crazy and divorced from our every day lives science is leading us.

Are we just mathematics? Perhaps. But also perhaps, this apparent elegance of mathematics could be the result of us relying on deduction and logic to work out the Universe - the more we look for those patterns the more we discover, building on the blocks we have built before. As we find more and more aspects of nature that fit in with our concurrently evolving mathematical tools, it almost seems as if we are not creating these objects, but discovering them.

But maths is inherently inconsistent - as Gödel showed, no system of logic can include the assumptions or axioms it is built on. There always needs to be a way of understanding the system outside of it - "This sentence is false". Foundations in mathematics could be as solid as sand.

Perhaps whatever tools are used, given enough time, we would create a Universe that makes sense - its just maths is our current most successful interpretation of the world. It is a relatively modern one - its only really since the 1200s that maths has become centre point to much of science. And lets not forget, although Newton was successful in applying his Laws of Motion in one of the greatest feats of mathematical genius, analysing the reality of nature to trace objects in motion in his calculus, with retrospect his curves were inaccurate - they worked only for objects that travelled an insignificant fraction of the speed of light. When those objects approached that speed (as most matter in the Universe is) those equations must be modified, as Einstein pointed out. Our laws founded in maths are always with the caveat they will be modified when the model is proved insufficient. Science argues that these models are to be discovered yet, but many have pointed out that we could one day reach a point our simulations aren't sufficient. The natural conclusion if this is not true, that we can one day simulate reality perfectly with our simulations is that we ARE in a simulation.

If not maths, then what?

Before maths' success, we relied on myths, stories and legends. Whilst adequate for a caveman to survive, their subjectivity are only suited to tribes competing against one another for resources, otherwise we start killing each other over whose imaginary friend is better than another.

But perhaps why both these two strands exist today, the logical and the faithful, are they are two dominant aspects of human nature. And as they are human, we can only really talk of reality for us - to other creatures or worlds things are completely different, in ways outside of our experiences.

Those views could be just as real for them, and it would be, just not recognizable to us since we would try and measure it only in our systems of thought.

What other ways of looking at the world do our current systems not support? Obviously impossible to answer, a few guesses...

Maths is mostly about the notion of movement - it has little to say about objects qualities of themselves. Its always in relation to another. Look at the difficulties we're having trying to find that most basic of qualities, mass.
We break up experiences into our five senses, and can distinguish between them. But an animal simply experiences situations through all of the senses - it cannot separate a yellow ball is related to a yellow banana.
Its more a two way exchange - our reality changes depending on our views.

A non-objective reality for all

The last viewpoint is most interesting to me, and there are lots of placebos being sold as cures that take advantage of it. Its a known fact that our pain thresholds are affected by our viewpoint - I'm currently reading Predictable Irrationally which describes how a 1p aspirin is less effective than a 50p aspirin purely due to the way our bodies anticipate it.

One interesting thing is that we may have found the mechanism that controls an ever changing subjective world, brought to us through maths - perhaps these systems we have used over the ages (direct experience, myths, maths) are necessary for each, and like astrological aeons represent different ways of looking at the world. (the way myth has affected maths would be an interesting blog post - as this post says, "there is no written history of the evolution of language")

The same mathematician in the first video of this post also believes in the Many-World interpretation of quantum mechanics - that for each circumstance that demands a particle must be in two places at once (or be travel at an indeterminate speed*), it actually splits into two universes which we observe only one of. Since there are billions of decisions made of this nature every time a particle interacts, this obviously increases the size of reality quite considerably.

If life has evolved to always take the most favourable path, it must interact with all of these universes and make choices. (and by life perhaps we could say "self organising information"). Or perhaps it is like the final scene of the "The Prestige" where we only remember those worlds we survive no ill effects - in which case could you forever be immortal?

Could it be possible our reality has evolved so that our desires and fears are represented in the world around us? Before I'm flayed and executed as those who purport "The Secret" (whose author said those who died in the Thailand Tsunami "must have been thinking Tsunami thoughts" to have such a disaster befall them"), I would modify this that this doesn't mean we can simply "think" sex and riches to us with the power of thought, but rather our influence battles with the rest of society to arrive at an average world (which would say that if we eliminated suffering from the world, it would always be gone)

Miraculous Reality

Whatever reality turns out to be, I will make a guess and say it won't be a truly objective experience - although science has historically always moved in the direction of humans not being in anyway special to this Universe, the fact we're the ones defining reality will always make us centre to its interpretation. If that turns out to be purely maths, that will still be a miraculous wonder, similarly if it turns out that we need more than maths to fully describe it. I only wish to be able to see how it turns out - one of my dreams would be to be able to see and know what the last conscious being will see and know. This could obviously be a horrible scenario, but I have a feeling it'll be wondrous.

* The best explanation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle I've seen is that its like a camera photographing a car - you can either have a fast shutter speed and know exactly where it was but not know its speed - or a slow shutter speed and knows it speed but not know its direction.

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A bit of web house spring cleaning

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 11:41:19 -0800

I've done a bit of rearranging of furniture on-line, so a quick post detailing it all (and why I didn't just stick with Facebook):

New personal portal site at http://markedmondson.me - not only is this domain used for Google Apps to clean up all my email accounts but I figured its good to have a personal ID on-line that isn't owned by another company such as Facebook. There is a bit of work to do, but this domain will carry links to personal projects such as this blog, and general personal info. It should also rank pretty quickly for vanity Google search which I think will be valuable in the future - I have an Australian 1970s tennis player, a photographer, affiliate web designer and a New York actor versions of Mark Edmondson's to beat in the SEO race :-)

New Tumblr sub-domain for this blog: http://scrapbook.hollowsun.co.uk - this is a replacement for my old Soup account which is a good idea but suffers from major site lag for Europeans. I also wanted to try out Tumblr and tap into the community features there, so this sub-domain will be used as a scrapbook of good pictures and videos I find. Also has a nice feature where you can submit your own pictures, links and video to me and it'll appear there. Its accessible via the link to the left, under "My Web Scrapbook" :-) I also SEO'd this blog a little.

For the moment, I direct link to my Last.fm page to the left under "My Music Tastes" - I tried to embed Last.fm in a frame but it has frame busting refreshes that have thwarted me. Grah. Also have learnt that those JavaScript widgets don't work on Posterous - which is why the Last.fm widget never updated and a Twitter feed to the right never showed up. Eventually I'd like to put some (finished!!) music up on this page.

No, I couldn't have just stuck this all on Facebook

Why all this and not just whack it all on Facebook? Because some free web services are only free because you give them permission to make money off your information. I do not like being commoditised to make Zuckerberg richer, and I want to own all the information I put into the system, not it being owned by someone so an evil marketer like me can sell you crap. As time goes on information is becoming more and more powerful - we just need to look at what is happening in the Middle East now to see that.

I also believe that Facebook is peaking, and the future of the web will not be people being herded into one service all their friends use, but as people become more web savvy the personal on-line nature will be more customised, but integrated. The Semantic Social Web. MySpace started a revolution of people representing themselves on-line, but spoilt it with ads and too much freedom - Facebook capitalised on that but is now so uncool my Mum is on it (sorry Mum). The only way they can cement their position is to become the only way for people to represent themselves on-line, and be a portal for micro-payments, social sign ins etc. I don't like the sound of that. Many people in my industry are besotted with Facebook as THE way to market crap to the masses, but even amoung them no one seems to acknowledge that actually, most people on Facebook aren't there to click ads, they are there to express themselves and hang out with mates. Whilst I'll keep a feed from here into Facebook so others know what I'm up to, I'm hoping to be able to keep off that bus.

Or maybe it is just because I never like to do what everyone else is doing. Whatever :-)

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The Medium of the Web affecting how we Work and Think

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 13:23:00 -0800

Right, I'm not going a whole month without posting in this blog, oh the good intentions dashed against the rock of apathy, when I started this blog up I was convinced I would post every day. Oh well.

I've been busy, organising the new decade. I have a new email (me [at] markedmondson.me ) due to installing Google Apps on the new markedmondson.me domain ( I'll put something sensible up at www.markedmondson.me soon) , which will also help organise my plan to create some automated income; or "muse" as it is called by my current inspiration, "The 4 Hour Work Week", which although is frankly terribly written, is one of those wanky self help books that do look to give more practical advice than most.

As an example, even the title of the book itself was tested using Adwords to select that title which would elicit the most click through's. Clever clever. Anyway, I've been recommended to read it by several people who know what I do and my ambition to not work very hard, so took the gift of a Kindle this Christmas as an excuse to pick it up for £4.

The "muse" is an online business (in most cases) which takes advantage of tools and automation now available to provide a passive income that frees you up to pursue your more ambitious dreams.

It talks of ways to negotiate quitting working at the office by being so efficient out of it it'll be ridiculous to be refused - a point also raised by the Basecamp CEO Jason Fried in a recent TED talk - a workplace office is actually one of the worst places to get a job done due to the CONSTANT INTERRUPTIONS.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen_at_work.html

The route to efficiency given in the book mirror a lot of things that I seem to have picked up already - focusing on one or two important things to do a day and finish those - everything else is minor. Its true - all those seemingly urgent calls and emails melt away if you're not available, and not just because you're more irresponsible :) , but because people take responsibility. I was without my phone for a month and it meant a quiet, peaceful life where everything still got done on time. You can imagine how life as a consultant can get pretty heavy with the amount of requests coming in, which to date I've coped with via email filters and GTD , but it gets even more manageable when you train people not to trouble you unless it really is an emergency :) And what kudos you lose for not being on hand at people's beck and call you gain back tenfold by being productive on awesome projects that make a longer term difference, rather than fire-fighting all the time.

The book also talks of an information free diet, meaning don't waste time with email, twitter, social networking etc at work. This is a lot harder for me to achieve, since I'm so hooked on it, but like this blog I hope that making it count via quality not quantity will mean I can hold onto this regime also - I can think of no better quality time to spend on social web than to contribute.

How the above is an example on the Web Medium's affect on us

And now, to my main point! How the medium of the web is allowing such ways of working to evolve, and how the medium affects our life and thoughts.

We are in a situation where information is disseminated everywhere - evidenced by my recognising already a lot of the points made in the book above by reading blogs of people who had already read it.
We have too much information - I need email filters and regimes to try and only receive the important tasks to be productive in a work day.
In a similar style, I'm addicted to this information and interaction. The fear of missing an event too late, or to not have anyone respond to you, is crippling. I both loathe Facebook and check it twice a day.
The same information network allows people to work from anywhere in the world that has a connection. The book also talked about using virtual assistants and automation to take care of the monotonous parts of your daily routine, giving examples of a virtual PA from India doing everything from booking airline tickets to researching new job opportunities for you.
There are several studies showing that kids these days are being affected by the hyper-links of the web to have improved lateral thinking, but being less able to concentrate on one task at a time.
Its impossible for corporations to keep things secret any more, one leak and everyone knows (Wikileaks, Egypt Revolution)
If you attempt to block the web for one group, everyone else knows about it - check out this Google service showing Egypt's closure of the web and how it affected Google searches

I've tried to keep away from describing what the medium is actually broadcasting, since that is almost irrelevant - its how that medium affects us overall that is the focus. I think I'm a pretty good case study for this since I gave up TV 5 years ago and get most of my information from the Web. In a nutshell, after probably putting in 100 hours a week on the web for the past five years (maybe 25,000 hours) I would say it has made me:

Less tied to one location
Less able to concentrate
More selective in what I read/watch/listen
More diverse in what I read/watch/listen to
Less trusting of traditional media
More appreciative of meeting people face to face
More sure that we are not just a sum of our like's and interests
Able to become an expert (or more expert than most) in any subject of interest within a day
Less likely to become an expert in a subject
The more accountable a person is on-line, the more they present Superegos.

I wonder when I hit that 100,000 hour mark, what this list will be. Maybe it'll be like Tron, and I'll control the matrix or summit :)

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Values of Faith - Soaking up every moment

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 13:10:00 -0800

Been very scientific recently, but its not all rational. Some things are believed in with no proof.

Like Synchronicity: the belief that things happen to you when you are ready. Although I think this is a scientific belief - an effect that occurs because we normally wander through life with such blinkers on we ignore most of what happens. We can't cope with many things at once, our senses are filters, not exhaustive recorders. Our bit processing power is about only about 7 +/- 2 ..seven things at once is not a lot. I think its like how life probably got started - we are exposed to so many opportunities that looking out for particular criteria it surprises us when it happens, yet the same if not better opportunities occurred before when we were not ready for it.

But if we are open to opportunities, they happen. This is all talked about in various hokey self help books, the most cynically depressing being The Secret which swindles people out of money for this truism. Before those, it was old religions - tasked to shape your world with expectations so that those expectations are more likely to happen - its your choice whether to make this more for your own benefit or for those in control.

Synchronicity in Books

The most hokey self-help books I got hooked with (mostly since it was the first I read at a sensitive 18 years old) were The Celestine Prophecy, and to some respects Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The Celestine Prophecy took it to ridonkulous extremes by maintaining the Inca had disappeared by vibrating onto another plane, but apart from that it communicated some truisms on the way people deal with stuff (Intimidators, Interrogators, Aloof and Poor Me) ...and Jesus Christ its got a film out. It is at least based on more sensible thinking than Scientology, and give that 100 years and we'll have Scinetology fanatics blowing themselves up in buses protecting their god-given absolutism self expression. Fuckers.

ZATAOMM is a lot more thought out and still carries a lot of weight, I could do with rereading it - it introduced the idea that Western thought of discreetness is dominated by the Greeks and I remember writing a little list of rules to live life by form it, I wish I still had that. The best I remember was "Given the choice between what is Right and what is Good, choose the Good"

Most deal with ways to make yourself more aware, or deal with the troughs you pull yourself through. The latest entertainment which parodies much of them is The Dice Man, which synchronicity has bought to me after picking it up in a shop with 10 seconds to choose before closing (being a story about a 32 year old man with slightly tired dreams and moving from depressed boredom to happy boredom)

Dreams, Unconscious and their Conscious Effects

And our unconscious plays with us, preserves us - it must look after us if only for the selfish reason to keep you around for propagation. Or we do things unconsciously because some event in our past we forget explicitly but remember implicitly.

I sleep a lot. I fucking love sleeping. I average about 9 hours a day. The best bit is just after your alarm goes off, and you drift. You remember little snippets of REM, glimpses into other worlds of your own making. The most significant are those that jolt you awake, that force themselves into conscious memory. They seem important. When I look back, a large percentage of life has been in those moments. That remembering is essential for my success - I swear problems are worked out from the day within the night. "Sleeping on it" works, from music practice to program design.

I've been remembering a lot as well. Events from ten years ago, remembering what I was doing, who I was talking, what I was caring about. I see I place as much weight in those memories as dreams today - not enough to change your life but to steer it in a direction. What if all those memories were erased suddenly, would I be a totally different person? I don't think so - the same values will hold, the same pride, the same worries and doubt. A beautiful point made in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

How to train the unconscious? How is that steered in the direction that will be the most productive? Find as many stimulants as possible, and try to be aware of every moment - the high whine of your nerves, the pressure of your surroundings on your body, the ticking of every second going by. This is what John Cage's 4'33'' is about, for me.

Following the dreams

Anyhow, a rambling post of nothingness? Probably, but will also end in a promise - I'm going to be more political. Fucking student riots, banker credit crunch McFucks and Wikileaks has given me a spark that something could be done, if people cared enough. My political ideology shall be Libertarian Socialist, which I thought I had made up through etymology, looking for a socialism that also stressed a small government and the equality of the individual, until I saw that it is actually shared by a hero of mine, Noam Chomsky. Still, no one is with me on my similarly created religion, Agnostic Anthropicy.

When people ask Chomsky what can be done to change the world for the better, he replies -

"Those people who make a difference come to me and don't ask me what can be done; they tell me what they are doing"

I'd like to meet him one day and tell him what I've done.

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List of Anthropic Coincidences in the Universe - The Inevitability of You

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 13:30:00 -0800

I've been reading through Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" recently which is a very entertaining popular science book that touches on science from the big bang to the evolution of homosapiens. The cosmology factoids I had heard before during my education, but I still enjoyed them along with the sections on geology, biology, taxonomy etc - and that the book concentrated on the people behind the ideas as much as the ideas themselves.

One great theme in the book is trying to describe the impossibly big and small numbers involved, and getting the head around those figures presents a conflicting perspective to human egos: there is so much "stuff" out there it seems inevitable we're here by pure chance alone, relying solely on those monkey typewriters; yet the amount of conspiring that has needed to fall into place for us to occur is so improbable - we are living a miracle every day.

Yet, if we compare ourselves against the amount of "stuff" and we are very very tiny and insignificant. (so don't compare....)

How many lucky events were needed to conspire to create us? Almost as many as the universe itself, but it is this page I'll keep updated with those I come across.

So here it is - a list of the Necessary Qualities to this Universe needed to create You:

The Universe is "flat" - if more matter had been in the Universe then the force of gravity would have collapsed the Universe before life began - if it had less matter everything would have been too far apart to interact properly to create life.
The existence of matter - super-symmety indicates that matter and anti-matter should have been created in equal amounts at the Big Bang - for some reason there was under 1% less anti-matter created (symmetry breaking) that meant when matter and anti-matter annihilated each other there was some left to create us.
If the mass of a neutron was 0.2% heavier, protons would collapse into them so creating no elements.
The fine structure constant, alpha - linked to other dimensions such as the Strong Force, which if it had been slightly higher would have turned all early hydrogen into helium, so preventing creation of molecules such as water
Carbon would be much rarer were it not for the triple-a nuclear fusion process in stars. If oxygen had a nuclear resonance a little lower, all the carbon would have rapidly changed to oxygen.
Water is the only know non-metallic substance that has its solid form less dense than its liquid form. Without that, ice would sink and oceans would soon freeze solid.
A first generation of stars were needed to create the heavier elements in their final days, and to then eject it via supernovae to form new stars and planet systems. If the force of gravity and other constants hadn't been just right, no heavier element synthesis would occur.
Earth is a double planet system - its Moon is much larger relative to its host than any other planet so far known. It is speculated to have formed when a planetoid hit Earth 5 billion years ago and got knocked off the Earth - The benefits of the Moon includ
Moon: It keeps the Earth in a more stable orbit
Moon: It creates tides, of which tidal pools are speculated to be necessary for early life to form
Moon: It creates cool looking solar eclipses(!) - not strictly necessary but a pure coincidence that the Moon and the Sun look the same size from Earth (does this encourage intelligent life to discover astronomy?)
The Earth exists in the "Goldilocks" zone - not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet
Somehow, water arrived on the planet, speculated from impacts of comets (with amino acids?) early in Earth's formation.
Bio-genesis - somehow, in a little understood process, self replicating molecules formed out of amino acids, including RNA and DNA
Self replicating cells appeared and lived happily for billions of years, before at some point one captured mitochondria giving more energy for multicelluar life.
The Earth has been through several extinctions that at some points wiped out 95% of all life.
The Earth has a molten hot iron core that creates a magnetic field deflecting solar radiation that would kill all life if left unchecked.
The Solar system has several big outer planets that hoover up a lot of the asteroids in the solar system that could cause more frequent (extinction?) impacts.
Because of the last extinction event, dinosaurs were wiped out and mammals took over their ecological niches
As the continents drifted, the created world wide ecological events such as the creation of Panama and the Alps - Panama blocked off the Pacific and Atlantic oceans so making the African plains dry out enough that our ancestors had to drop out of the trees and walk the plains. The Alps also created the ice age which selectively favoured adaptable humans.
The Solar System is created in a fairly quiet suburb of the Milky Way which has no big concentrations of large stars that could create black holes, quasars or supernovae.

There are a lot more - suggest some in the comments or get in touch if you like and I'll put them in with credit to you - I'll keep this page updated and will add links as I come across good references.

To qualify, it needs to be a property of nature that if slightly different would mean we wouldn't be around to read this blog post. (things like "I got up this morning" don't count :o) )

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Good, Evil, Entropy and Creation

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 09:16:00 -0800

Entropy is the measure of how disordered a system is, and is one of the most fundamental ideas in physics today. The Laws of Thermodynamics include the findings that in a self contained system, entropy always increases - this means that over time, any organised system will eventually decay: nothing lasts forever. High entropy is classed as a random state, whilst low entropy more organised.

A common illustration of this is that an egg breaks into lots of parts more often than groups of atoms spontaneously combine to form an egg, and with this idea it can be seen that entropy also provides a mechanism for "time's arrow" - in general things decay and become more and more disorganised.

Examples of low and high entropy

Entropy can also be thought of as looking at how much information is needed to describe a system - a highly ordered system can be described in less space than a highly disordered system. In fact, a common definition of maximum entropy is when the description of a system is the same length as the system itself. As an example, here is a string of numbers:

010101010101010101010101

This can be described as:

12x01 (5 characters)

A second set of numbers is more random:

946570234

This can only be described as itself:

946570234 (9 characters)

i.e. the first number is described in less characters, even though the length of the second number is smaller.

The first number can be said then to have lower entropy than the second - it is easier to describe the first number than the second.

The link between entropy and information

One key thought experiment also gives a relationship between information and entropy - James Clerk Maxwell came up with a scenario commonly known as Maxwell's Demon, in which he imagines a demon knowing where every atom exists in a system - with this knowledge the demon can reverse entropy by manipulating the system, for example traping all the high energy particles on one side of the room to make it hot whilst the other side gets cold. The more information about the locations of the atoms is known by the demon, the lower entropy state that can be manipulated.

This is interesting in relation to our efforts with technology, in particular Google's stated mission to "organise the world's information".

One question unanswered by physics today is how the Universe started in a low entropy state. Somehow, the universe was once in the space smaller than an atom, from which all creation sprung forth. Whether you believe in cyclic or multi-verses, no mechanism has been found that will naturally give a low entropy state.

Another big question is about life - the reason life and technology has sprung up is as things get more organised, in direct opposition to increasing disorder. There is no violation on the macroscopic level, since if you look at an entire system such as the plant Earth the law holds, since energy radiated off the earth is in a higher entropy state than it is when it was collected. What happens with life and humans is a local fluctuation - we get more organised at the expense of our environment getting less organised, but the entire system if regarded as our environment, decreases. What is interesting is the self perpetuating nature of our "fluctuation".

One idea postulated by David Deutsch (Chapter 8 in Frabic of the Universe) is that in a multi-verse, life is a lot more sensitive to minor variations that each multiverse may carry. Whilst an inert rock may not care if an atom is swapped with another, to life this could be the difference between life and death. If multiverses branch off from each other, this could mean lower entropy universes (those with life) place a bound on what type of universes are created.

Another feature of life is that it has its own Von Neumann machines, called ribosomes.

Attribution: Bensaccount at en.wikipedia

These remarkable biological machines are in every cell, and create copies of every protein from the information stored in DNA. It could be argued that they are the reason we move towards lower entropy than our surroudings - they are responsible for creating copies of every building block of life from the information kept within DNA, and it could have been the genesis of these complex organic molecular units that help spark off life itself (they are consititued of 40% RNA, which make some speculate they are living fossils left over from a proto-life RNA world)

Good and Evil

All this brings me to Good and Evil. I am of the opinion that Entropy and Creation are concepts that all life recognises, and that we humans have placed ethical values upon. Things that destroy or increase entropy are regarded as negative - events that decrease or make more organised are generally regarded as good.

I think this is important as one common criticism of atheists is that they have no moral compass; that the belief in God is necessary to know the difference between good and evil (despite the dubious implication that you need a holy decree to stop doing evil things, rather than simple humanism) - I suggest that this difference between good and evil is implicit in all life, or even all self replicating systems.

It also introduces a system to account for ethical quandaries - if killing is evil, is a doctor evil for killing a cancerous tumour? Obviously not, and seen through the eyes of entropy can be justified - cancer is a system of disorganised cells growing uncontrollably, so increasing the entropy of a human system - by removing the cancer cells the system of the human body will have lower entropy and so live longer.

It also perhaps gives some hope for humans when faced with our supposed descendants - synthetic intelligences and organisms. As they will also be created via self replicating systems, they should hold the same values as us and value creation and the preservation of order rather than our destruction (ala Skynet) (unless it is decreed our destruction is overall more creative, treating us like a cancer....)

This also gives ideas to those that are creating - those people that make stuff, organise, procreate or make it easier for others to do so help lower our overall Entropy, and this is a direction our genes recognise and reward, since it helps keep us and them self replicating.

And, perhaps, it will help create the Universe itself one day (sorry for the repeated link to The Last Question, but it is almost my religion :) )

Ever decreasing Entropy

There have been several milestones reached this year which should make sure 2010 goes down in history as a year we helped our drive downwards in Entropy.

First creation of synthetic life - if life is ordered, imagine what directed by intelligence synthetic life could achieve
First creation of an artificial universal constructor - the first case where a mathematical universe created its first universal constructor, at least 5 years ahead of schedule.

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Grief and the Web

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 13:06:00 -0800

Grief is the bitterest part of being human, but it is part of us - and so it follows us onto our online persona's.

(Suggested music to read post by:
)

Recently, Jaamit Durrani, a popular member of the SEO community, died in a train accident. Although I didn't know him personally it created the same feelings as if I had - I had interacted only through 1s and 0s, mainly through Twitter and seeing his face around blogging, but his loss felt just as senseless and bitter. What is remarkable is the outpouring of tributes that have came out of his sudden death on the medium, and it got me thinking about how things have changed so suddenly in the last few years now the web is the medium of choice.

Another member of the company I work for also died last year, named John Holmes. In similarly tragic circumstances, he died of leukemia. In both cases, I almost cursed the efficiency of the web in providing information, since I learned of both via a "RIP" message in a status update. The throw away nature of a short message didn't seem to carry the brevity needed for such news. Status updates are usually used for such trivial reasons that for important news I somehow expected it to be delivered in a more formal setting - a letter, conversation or announcement.

Update 11th Dec 2010 - Been shown this heart wrenching story of Shana Greatman Swers; a Facebook addict new mother who communicated blow by blow on Facebook the journey of the birth of her baby to her own death via complications - very sad and very relevant to this post so have included.

But the mediums are the message - and for the web that means interactive, instant, and semi-permanent.

I think it is those qualities that will shape how people deal with grief in the web age. Because whilst we may hear of someone departing almost instantly, we can also search through someones digital life after they die, and remember them. And that is the best way I can think of of making tribute to those who have passed away; to keep their memory alive and let their influence affect your day to day living for the better. Both John and Jaamit above still appear in web searches, suggested friend lists and RSS streams through their web profiles on various sites. To prevent this offending, Facebook has a form to help remove appearances to avoid disrespectful listings, but a similar service may not be available for all web profiles as of yet - without access to a loved ones email there may be no way to stop such continued messages from the grave (although a message to the site admins should be successful)

What else could the new web age do to help with people coming to terms with grief? Following the Kübler-Ross model:

Denial - "This can't be happening" - the ability to block or filter out messages that remind of the grief
Anger - "Who is to blame?" - people will lash out, sensitivity to such behaviour may be needed by community leaders
Bargaining - "Just one more time" - allowing memories or old photos and video's to be available to help deal with grief
Depression - "Why go on?" - Avoidance of trying to 'cheer them up' with sensitivity to this necessary process
Acceptance - "Its going to be okay" - Coming to terms with the loss - memories and letting it affect today

What is a person?

An aspect that is more controversial looks into what actually makes up a human being that we mourn - and this is one of the problems I have with the way the social media medium seems to be developing - it has commoditised a person: boiled them down into discrete boxes; "Likes"; links and blurred the word "Friends".

We are more than a list of things, and that is what I feel must be remembered.

But to some, our digital life is thought to become an ever increasing sum of what and who we are. TV shows like "Caprica" use a person's on-line persona to populate a robot AI. There are even some who speculate that we may develop or even now exist in a virtual simulation, Matrix style. As being human involves more and more aids such as technology, that technology may become us. (or we become technology)

But for now, we can still live and breath in the old world, and talk with loved ones through speech and not virtual text. Because communication is more than words, its ideas and the inner space; our morality. If we can let those who are gone influence us in there, they will always live on through us. I hope that does not change as we move into our digital horizon.

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Fevers accelerating time

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 08:19:00 -0800

Ever so fast life; we totally ignore the majority of it.

Occasionally I get fevers where it is all revealed. All senses accentuate. I'm writing from within one now. A high pitched whine overlooks. Cars on the street are deafening. I type these words at a million miles per hour. Perception of time is accelerating. To lice (live) like this all the time would mean a hyperactive restless soul. Too fast to worry about details you just want to have wrote, write as fast as you can, the stream of consciousness, mess, bound to lead to a revelation. As soon as the outside world intervenes I snap out.

A message has come; I will now attach a huge significance to it.

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Are we using technology or is technology using us?

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 13:49:00 -0800

A recent thought that has been swirling around my inner space has been the idea that technology may be using us as a resource as much as we use it.

This calls upon the ideas of evolution applied to technological advances, in that those technologies that can replicate and evolve are driven towards self perpetuation, out competing bad or unfit technology. If we look back in human advancement, it can be seen that the drive of science has worked hand in hand with the technology it helps create - as technology helps to push back our perceptions of the universe so new phenomenon appear that we look to fit into our version of order. Fire leads to smelting leads to glaziers leads to optics leads to telescopes leads to astronomy leads to gravitational theory and so on.

Temes

Sue Blackmore talks of these ideas as independent entities playing on the idea of memes to create "temes"

http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html

One thing I think everyone could agree on is that our technology could out survive us - in fact it could even destroy us if you believe fiction such as The Matrix or The Terminator. It is a theme often visited in sci-fi; that our legacy may not be our organic forms, but our ideas and our creations that gain the ability to replicate and improve themselves without needing our interference.

No Time for Technology

In these scenarios I try to think of the perspective as if time wasn't involved: firstly because I'm sure our perception of time isn't one that is consistent with every interaction with the universe; and secondly that time could also be just a man-made limitation that limits our scope. With this perspective, an object exists not just at one moment, but in every moment it ever has or ever will. Every atom that makes you up, used to exist in the middle of stars before being blown out in supernovae to reseed and settle on planet Earth and help create our ancestor. Particles that have no mass, so moving at the speed of light, experience the entire history of the Universe in one moment. This is a nice way of looking at things and makes me feel very connected.

"Don't worry! From the light's point of view, home and your eye are in the same place, and the journey takes no time at all! Relativity saves the day again."

And so it is with technology - thinking about the entire history of Technology (I will call it an object and capitalise) - if we and our creations survive then the evolution of Technology could feasibly become an entity within the Universe that could have great power and influence. We can see what it has already done to our planet - with our help Technology is the greatest driving force of change affecting the Earth, one that has terraformed 80% of the planet's surface and could be classed as a geological period, Anthropocene. (I would argue that the next period or maybe even this one should be called Technopocene - the era of Technology.) What would Technology need to do if it ever has the power to reach back in time and create itself? What would the small pebble need to be that would start the technological avalanche - a black monolith talking to ape-like ancestors? A spark of abstraction in a sentient mind, allowing replication of stone tools? Or just a strike of lightning at the right place at the right time making the burning bush?

Moore's Law leading to the Technological Singularity?

The difference between this period with any other is that the pace of change is ever increasing, and is visibile almost before our eyes - whilst the gap between fire and domestication of animals took eons, today Moore's Law shows that a doubling of processing power occurs in half the time the last doubling occurred - as each new processor is produced the first edition is immediately put to use creating its successor. People often talk about the Technological Singularity, a theorised time where this doubling process occurs second to second, although I think this may be abusing mathematical models, the same process that predicts by looking at current trends by 2050 the entire US population will be either in prison or working for prisons. Trends change.

The disturbing thing for me is that it is now a Leviathan completely out of our control is all around us - no longer can a Renaissance Man read all the books that exist - the knowledge of one subject can preoccupy one individual all their life, as the volume of information (most of it arguably useless) balloons. And the forces of information organisation looks to be driven by evolutionary principles - the strong survive and the weak die. Within social media and the web this video describes the process fantastically and sparked off most of this blog posts musings:

God of Fire

Human beings are helping organise the world; could we then be regarded as a resource to be used up, as much as coal and water is used by power stations? If evolution favours any information process that can replicate and evolve, are we the agents controlling that process, or are we just constituent parts?

And so, welcome to the worship the God of Fire, Technology - the spark of innovation that has breathed life into most of the inanimate things around us.

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Lessons from a Belgian Taxi Driver

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 12:54:00 -0800

I was in Brussels for the first time the other day, and experienced an apathetic, wet, polluted, bureaucratic city whose main industry seemed to be diplomats. Huge grey buildings towered over a population of bankers and administrators, and even more desperate people dodged near-stationary traffic jams looking for something; anything.

A Voice

I'm not going to judge a city on one night and two rainy days, but I am going to judge it on a conversation with my French-Belgian taxi driver who took me to the airport.

View Larger Map

Once we got past the awkward conversation in Franglaise establishing this was the taxi I booked, I coaxed him into commenting on the local situation - why a country that is the centre of European Government not able to form a Government of its own.

Cultural Split

He informed about the split in Belgium - between the Flemish Dutch-speaking north and the Walloon French-speaking south. How each language group had its own Government, and the collapse of the overarching Federal Government he thought signalled the end of Belgium as a distinct country with ten to fifteen years.

He blamed the Flemish - citing a decision by some in the then richer Flemish population in the 1970s to push for separation and use their control of the Belgium media to create an environment to do so. Then he cited what he thought was the main difference, ideology - the Flemish were capitalists (backed by the US), the Walloon's socialists. It was, fundamentally, a capital verses labour argument.

It seemed this was an example on how a small bias in a population can lead to distinct groups forming. My driver had a Grandad who was Flemish - they had moved to the French speaking Walloon and experienced prejudice, but not until they had had children of their own who spoke French with the local kids whilst playing in the street. When they moved back to the North the kids were ostracised for talking in the language of the (then) oppressors. Brussels was the best option left, having a bi-lingual and more tolerant society than the provinces. Any small bias (even if not fully racist) will eventually produce communities of homogeny - you can house red and blue people alternatively in a street, but if the red people have a preference to live next to other red people, given only a few generations and moving house you will have big red and blue patches. I would argue this is inevitable, and instead of trying to ignore bias, spend time on making sure different communities do not become introspective, that they interact with other groups often to prevent suspicion building. Obviously language is a huge part of this.

Capital verses Labour

Now I wouldn't take a UK taxi driver's word on British political affairs as gospel anymore than I would take it anywhere else, but his final remarks on capitalism verses socialism as we roared into the airport depressed me, since I see that this is still a political battle that I had been taught gone with the rise of New Labour - that both Right and Left are inadequate ways to govern. I think I probably just swallowed a political turd whilst an ideological student, but I do think that events such as the banking crises and collapse of the USSR both show that neither ideologies are absolute principles that just need to be applied correctly to work.

Day to day, I see this: That those people and institutions that embrace the accumulation of capital become impersonal, greedy machines, in which the survival of the fittest means the majority of people live in distress. On the other hand those that embrace state control of resources succumb to corruption and waste, where performance is based on increasingly political agendas and inefficiency is actively encouraged to keep people in jobs.

Plus points: Institutions focused on profit are more innovative and create efficiency, whilst those focused on people are happier and more stable.

Long Term Thinking

I would say my own thoughts on where the Government should feature in our lives has been most influenced by "The Clock of The Long Now", a project created with the support of Brian Eno to encourage long term thinking.

(Also check out Long Term Bets for some interesting predictions)

In the book, different areas of life were identified that beat to a different time - geological, ecological, culture, business, fashion. The argument is that decisions made are too often based on those of fashion and business time scales, when those that matter are more of cultural and ecological time scales.

From this, I look at Government being tasked solely with looking after the infrastructure of society - the roads, water and electricity - whilst decisions on how to conduct business, fashion and your daily life is left to groups closer to the action with invested interest in their own community. My dream is little anarchic groups who use social norms and a feeling of belonging to discourage anti-social behaviour - whilst the essentials in life are looked after by civil servants with no political prestige to the position. Perhaps this could only be achieved when machines can adequately maintain our resources. Essentialy I believe my view is a longer term, socialist principles used for macro-economics, with short term, capital market forces used on the local level.

My quote of the day is attributed to Winston Churchill, but he probably never said it :) :

“Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.”

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The science of happiness

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 01:49:00 -0800

All things said and done, a lot of the drive to influence others stems from a desire to be happy. Most of humans achievements look to enhance this, if you look at them from a certain viewpoint. The problem is, as always, this happiness drive doesn't apply to everyone and what looks evil to some is good to others. Moral relativism?

A-Bomb made to keep people happy?

An example of this is an atomic bomb. Most would agree this is an agent of destruction, capable of destroying our creations and the causation of suffering and unhappiness for many. Yet the creators of such a terrible weapon were motivated by the desire to end a world war and make the planet safer for them and their kind, and so happier. You can disagree with their methods, and I think many delude themselves to justify such work, but I have a peculiar optimism that most people are not Evil in the sense of causing destruction, instead having twisted methods of self justification. Certainly for other inventions such as the WWW or the printing press, a desire to make the world happier looks like a prime motivation.

TED talk - Happiness from Experience vs Memory

So given you believe me that most of humans achievements are motivated by being happy, lets try pin down what "happy" actually means. A very good TED talk by Daniel Kahneman speaks on this very subject:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html

We have here then at least two types of happiness - that which you experience RIGHT NOW, in the moment; and second your satisfaction with your memory of events. These are two different aspects of yourself on which to describe yourself as happy would depend on which one you are describing. I would venture that unless in pain or suffering depression, most people from moment to moment are not unhappy, so most people most of the time are at least content or happy. What people usually think of as the yardstick to answer the question "Are you happy?" is the memory of self - the recollection of your life in the recent past and whether you judge these are happy memories or sad.

Maslow

For happiness for the moment to moment (or at least un-unhappiness), it looks like we appeal to the bottom rung of the famous Maslow hierarchy of needs.

As we move up this pyramid, I propose that we more and more rely on our memory of self to make judgements on our state of happiness. I venture that the "happiness cut-off" Kahneman talks about in the video, that above a $60k annual salary it seems people do not get more happy, but below that more money does equal more happiness, relates to the second rung, where all basic needs such as health care, employment and resources are taken care of.

Above this level, to Love/Belonging, Esteem and Self Actualization, money can't really help, instead these aspects need to be placed in the context of others, and I think this is where the challenges can begin. Traditionally, these aspects look to be related to a judgement based on comparison with others in our social group.

This seems to play out when we look at measures of happiness around the world on a proposed counterpoint to GDP (an inherently capitalist metric), GNH - Gross National Happiness.

Colour signifies Highest rank through to lowest rank; grey indicates Information not available .

Those countries with the lowest rank were found to be not those with lowest incomes - rather it was those countries were the gap between rich and poor was the most disparate. When someone looked at their life and compared it with their peers, they were more likely to be unhappy if their peers were earning a lot more than them.

Meritocracy and Capitalism

An interesting aside to this is that in a true meritocracy, there are always going to be at least 50% of people worse off than the top 50%. Unless the gap between the top and bottom half is small, a true meritocracy will always have half the population unhappy - something to bear in mind when politics calls for "fairness".

Lets look at the behaviour of those who earn a lot of money - this is a key argument for free market capitalists - those in the top 10% of earners are argued to be happiest, the top of the Maslow pile, and are the ones most likely to be helping others, since they respectful and respected by others, and create innovations that will benefit all of mankind.

I think most people will agree this is over optimistic. Whilst top billionaires are sometimes philanthropists, this feels more like an exception that proves the rule. I think the argument falls down since as discussed above more money does not equal more happiness and fulfillment - indeed those who are most beneficial to society on a day to day level look to be those of holy dispositions, having little or no possessions.

Two ways to make your memory of self happier

So if your memory of your self is not made happier by spending more money, how is it improved?

There seem two ways to tackle this - either do not rely on your memory of self to be happy, rather making your world more experience based, or to concentrate on those activities that you will remember as being happy making, even if they do not seem so at the time.

1. Live in the moment

The first method, not relying on your memories of self, looks to be practiced by Eastern religions and meditation - to remove yourself from memories you need to remove yourself from judgements and comparisons, since they rely on memories to judge or compare with. To compare is to contrast is to judge is to place yourself in a box that is either higher or lower than another box.

2. No regrets

The second route relies on delayed gratification, concentrating on those experiences that you remember with fondness and those you are good at - if you aren't good at anything practice - according to Gladwell, you only need 10,000 hours to become world class :-)

And try to have no regrets - since regrets are memories which definitely aren't happiness inducing. This can really only be achieved by having a great amount of self knowledge about how you will remember what you are doing now, and is an eternal human struggle. All I can say is to try and be the best version of yourself as you can be.

Top Five Regrets of the Dying

To finish off, I'll transcribe a hauntingly beautiful list I read in the paper a few months ago that had such an effect I tore out the clipping and keep it in my wallet. It is a list from a nurse Bronnie Ware, who spent a lot of her years nursing the dying, entitled "Top Five Regrets of the Dying". I read it to be aware - below is her list and her comments:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others had expected of me.
Most people had not honoured even half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made or not made.
2. I wish I didn't work so hard.
This came from every male patient that I nursed. they missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
Many people suppressed their feelings to keep peace with others. As a results, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had let golden friendships slip.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Many did not realise until the end that happiness if a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits.

The last point really strikes home with me. It is a choice, as much as it is a choice to not be happy. It sometimes seems that people enjoy being misery. They miss the comfort of being sad. Misery loves company. But that is as the songs are, teenage and non-adult. If you are an adult, make the choice.

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Five proofs of God by an Agnostic

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 11:19:00 -0700

edit - and just after I publish I see Thomas Aquinas was 1500 years ahead of me with his "Five Proofs of God" - Quinque viae. Nice coincidence :-)

The Creationist verses Evolution argument for me is completely voided by the fact that those who favour Creationism aren't just poor scientists, but even worse Christians.

Those Christians that take the Bible at its literal word, miss out on 90% of its meaning. It was never intended as a history book, more a book on how to live a good life. You make your own choice whether it was divine intervention or not. And barring a few asides such as the Roman Catholics Inquisition (which they recently apologised for), the church has been the major benefactor of science over much of history. Creationism is a relatively modern movement of only around 80 years old, not a eon pitch battle between reason and faith as it is portrayed by modern fundamentalists.

It has been long known in the church that the Earth was older than could be traced back via the generations depicted in the Bible, since geology, astronomy and other sciences adequately prove. You don't need evolution to disprove a 6000 year old Earth.

However, Atheism is a lot softer a target, since by its very nature God can not be proved to exist, the same difficulties occur to prove he does not exist. By a strict definition, a lot of self proclaimed atheists are really agnostic.

A final complication is that every one's definition of God is completely different. Even atheists must have a definition of God to not believe in.

I'm not a fan of Religion. I believe it is an attempt to standardise a view of God that makes the many be controlled by the few. But I am not an atheist, since it can not be proved one way or another without doubt.

Here are my doubts:

Proof 1 - Boltzmann Brains

Photo credit

Occam's Razor is a scientific principle that the simplest explanation is usually the one of reality. The least complicated the solution, the more likely nature has found that way to do it.

Imagine a Universe. It has an unimaginable amount of particles and forces. These atoms fluctuate and can by chance clump together to create structures such as Galaxies.

Imagine a brain is created out of these random fluctuations (like yours). This brain can imagine a Universe, but has a less connections within it. (Or has it?)

This brain is a simpler system than a real Universe, therefore by Occam's Razor a Universe does not exist, but rather some brain imagining it. QED.

See here for comments by the brilliant Richard Feynman on Boltzmann Brains.

Proof 2 - Applied M-theory

M-theory is a meta theory that encompasses several versions of string theory, which proposes dimensional "branes" may collide and create Universes. It was recently used in Hawking's book, The Grand Design, and quoted as a method for disproving God once and for all, but again I think this is just a question of definition. If M-Theory turns out to be correct, it is feasible that applied M-theory could give mankind the power to create Universes. The great great great grandson of the LHC could be used to create baby Universes, which since made in their own dimensional space would expand and evolve without affecting our own Universe. Crazy stuff. (Would we be morally obliged to create Universes that could contain life?)

If the above is true, and assuming mankind is not a special case, then the chances are that extra dimensional aliens also discovered M-Theory and created our Universe. Or, perhaps, we created our own. The Last Question.

Proof 3 - Universal Gaia

The laws of physics so far discovered are elegant and profoundly beautiful in a way. But they only represent what humans can experience - as we develop more tools that can push that experience into deeper and further fields we can find more phenomenon that can be used to help formulate and prove our mathematical models of the Universe.

But these is nothing to say that what we understand or eventually all we understand will be everything - very often the "end of science" has been predicted, then something like Quantum Mechanics comes along that rewrites all the rules and we discover we haven't even really started.

It is quite possible that our levels of perception may never develop to a stage where we can experience everything, and it is only when everything can be perceived that we will know for sure if God exists or not. But when we can perceive everything, we will be omniscience which could be a definition of God.

If we can't perceive everything, then there will be a part of nature that will be unsolvable, but shaping the natural laws of the Universe, an "Implicit Order". I argue that this Order could be construed as God.

This is a twist on the "God of Gaps" in that those natural phenomenon that can not be explained by current understanding are attributed to God.

Proof 4 - Solipsism

Cartoon by Toothpaste for Dinner

I can only be sure that I exist. I'm reading this sentence, so I know I can imagine a Universe. If I'm the only conscious entity in this Universe, I am God (or at least my subconscious is).

A bit weak this one, I admit. Another variation is the idea of quantum immortality, in that we only ever remember the version of the Universe where we are alive, so if its possible to live forever (which is feasible in this lifetime, given medical science's progress) then you will never die. If its possible to live to the end of the Universe and beyond, then we're back to The Last Question.

Proof 5 - The existence of faith

This may turn into a wisdom of the crowds argument, but fact remains that the majority of people on the planet do believe in "something" that they call God. To those without faith, it can be very hard to explain why they remain so convinced that something is there, and even those atheists that claim to have none have usually put their faith in something else, be it humanism, science, money or addictions.

One of the greatest points that comes out of The Illminatus! Trilogy, I think, is looking into how faith affects people's every day experiences. At the end of the book, depending on which view-point you take, either a mob of people destroy a music stage at the end of a rock concert, or the Great God Pan arises and smashes it with his fist. If the mob of people all believed it was the Great God Pan, if everyone you know and will know thinks the Great God Pan did it, then its only from a non/believers viewpoint that reality can be decided, and, if everyone's reality is based on their experiences, that reality can change depending on their own experiences.

I think this is why religion was a lot easier to sell before the days of mass communication - people were born and raised in one religion, and so that is all they knew.

I guess my general point here is that if the effects of a belief in God is the same as if God really exists, does the question even make sense? We all believe that a pillow has feathers, but if everyone thought it quacked would it be a duck? Are thoughts real?

This sounds woolly, but there is some science behind it, touched on above with quantum immortality - it looks as if every decision, all possibilities actually do exist, but the world we experience is the one we are aware of (the collapse of the wave function). I myself am very much aware that walking down the street with one belief can leave to a completely different experience than if you walk down the same road with another. Could faith, and belief, be somehow a mechanism to which world we experience? And if so, could everyone who believes in God live in a world with God, and all those who do not, don't?

As The Life of Pi beautifully puts it, which one would be your preference?

(Hmm I really should get an Amazon affiliate deal going, the amount of books I link to here ;-) )

What do I believe?

Those are some of my thoughts over the years. No doubt full of logical holes but I hope entertaining. Myself, I guess I would have to say I'm still agnostic, although put anthropic principles behind it that we are in the Universe that permits us to ask why precisely because we are around to ask the question.

I have sometimes had religious experiences, which were incredible, both drug induced and spontaneously at important times of my life, usually when great choices or changes are occurring, but I also see a great denial in people who prescribe to most of the world religions.

I'll sign off with a nice God quote, by someone who had quite the reason to believe in God at the time but stuck to his principles:

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use

Galileo

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The desire to influence

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 15:20:00 -0700

A couple of times already in this blog I've made mention of my belief that the desire for influence is the major motivational force for the human race, and I'd like to explain around that a bit in this post.

Putting things in boxes

It seems to me, that one of the major aspects of growing up is coming to terms with all that which is inside our skin to all that which is outside.

As infants we are like most animals, convinced the whole world is only what we experience. It is only when a theory of mind develops at around two years old that we recognise other people's worlds exist. A lot of this comes from our cognitive ability to compare similar sensory information from separate experiences. That banana is yellow and so is that ball. This yogurt smells of banana so will taste like a banana. This ability to separate the senses is unique to humans, a subject brilliantly examined in The Man Who Tasted Shapes, a book on synesthesia, a condition where this sensory separation breaks down.

We have the ability to abstract qualities and put them into categories; to create a taxonomy of qualities. This ability was evolutionary favoured in our ancestors, since it enables us to make quick comparisons and decide optimal strategies for finding food, shelter and mates.

And as with all taxonomies, there are some categories with more favourable qualities than others - this can be a preference for colours, ideas or anything that can be expressed with language. As these preferences are passed down the generations they are imperfectly duplicated, causing an evolutionary pressure to form i.e. the infamous meme theory of Dawkins.

Creating ideas seen by many

I propose that it is every humans desire to create successful ideas and memes, to perhaps even a greater degree than to procreate. In fact, the desire to procreate could be considered a sub-set of the desire to create successful memes, since whilst not everyone wishes to procreate, this is usually because they have other drives in life that they value as holding more value (be it a field of study, work or project). Conversely, to procreate means you have had an influence of the world in a most extreme way as possible for one person, that child owing their entire existence to you.

Today, I see this drive to influence most evident in the popularity of social networking on the web, where more and more netizens are becoming publishers of content. Warhol's 15 minutes of fame seems obsolete - today 15 seconds is more likely, with the chance that that video, status update or picture going viral and being seen by millions. And since the feedback is quicker than ever from your peer group and beyond, a good idea can be copied and rehashed by thousands of others and spread across the whole web.

Because that is where everything artificial starts - an idea in someones head. The inner space. Every wooden table, mathematical theory, child, status update or political idea started as an idea in a human who wanted to communicate that with the outside world. And as we progress, we have become less and less affected by natural causes and more by artificial or man-made forces - perhaps that is why earthquakes and volcanoes have such an effect on us - as most of the time our problems are all artificial in origin. Has our ability to influence the natural world become so trivial now we can easily eat and clothe ourselves, that our drives look at other ways to make our mark?

Reasons to influence

Why would we want to make our mark anyway? Perhaps its the knowledge of our own deaths, another dubious gift over that of an animal. Our just the strain for immortality by your genes, ensuring they can self replicate again. That same pressure is shown by ideas and memes - they want to exist beyond the individual, copied as many times as possible to ensure survival. Perhaps we are but vessels for their own selfish ends.

Obviously some go about this in more negative ways than others - if we look back in history the most influential people have to include Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan; but on the other foot you could count Jesus, Buddha and Aristotle. But I don't think a lot of people want to be Hitler or Jesus - most are quite happy by making a difference to their loved ones.

And its worth noting Buddha as that seems another way to escape this drive - to remove all desires and just exisit with the universe as it is meant to be. Perhaps this post is more a Aristotle/Protestant culture aspect, or even just my twisted view of the world! But another good reason to put it out there, to see if anyone sees any sense in what I'm driving at ;)

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The reason why I didn't do a PhD

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 13:11:50 -0700

I studied Physics at Kings College London and graduated with a 2:1 Masters which I'm proud of, since it was a hard thing to finish. The subject itself was obviously tough, but the main obstacle to finishing wasn't that, it was the acute lack of self-worth I felt at the time. I nearly didn't make it - I dropped out of my second year to live on the dole in London, eventually coming back to live with my folks in St. Ives and think about the rest of my life. I have an immense gratitude for those friends of that summer who helped me decide I should continue, mainly through showing me I was a part of the human race.

The main reason for my malaise was an accident a few months before leaving for University, when the family pet dog bit my top lip off. Instantly I cast myself as the freak lizard type character, with all scorn, averting eyes, slights and dark whispers poured into the numb scar left over from the plastic surgery, a blank nub in the middle of my face. This was my first introduction to grief, the second of which being my Grandad dying in my second year just before I dropped out, a death to which I reacted so shamefully I had become my own self fulfilling prophecy. My families grief I could not deal with, since it wasn't about me.

That lack of self worth, and thinking about my affliction all the time, had made me an incredibly selfish person. I thought only about my sacred appearance, which nobody else could possibly compete with. Problems around me were not my responsibility, but someone else's - or their own fault for being so superficial and not understanding me. I was an island of righteous fury, isolated from the masses.

I deeply regret how I treated my family and friends around me then - all of them were in retrospect genuine and I pushed them all away. For even though I was so self-obsessed, any moments to cherish still were all with them.

The rest, I do not regret. For working through the blackness gave me life lessons I cherish now, and I hope makes me a better person. How everyone is unique and precious. The belief that you make your own reality, if you're open to synchronisity. That feelings of darkness happen when inner space separates from outer space, when you make yourself alone. The sustained miracle of existence.

And the role of emotion in life. One of my defences when trying to rationalise my predicament was that emotions were subsidiary to intellect, and that I should rise above it all to become a robot of pure reason. But that isn't real - emotions are broad goal setters and the beginnings of deduction, necessary for a functioning consciousness, not something tacked on. Placebos work for a reason.

And that is why I didn't do a PhD. Because after learning all the physical laws about how things happen, there was no clue into why it was those laws, the emotions behind creation. I thought I would learn more about the reasons for existence in the world of humans than the world of academia. I do plan to go back one day, to do a thesis in what I have learnt whilst on my travels, but still need to find that subject. I think it'll be on something to do with how consciousness is an emergent property of self replicating information systems across a multiverse, but that sounds so kooky. I think about my Grandad when I do consider it, as he was a Physics lecturer in a former life. Maybe I'll just have kids and live in the country with my (non-bitey) dogs. Influence I think is what a lot of people crave, and that can be satisfying be it big waves or small ripples. But thats another post ;)

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Why Hollow Sun?

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 12:15:00 -0700

The title from this blog came from another occasion where I had to try and think of a phrase that summed up my creative output; naming a band I enjoyed playing guitar in a few years ago.

Eventually the band, through design committee, ended up as Holosun - but that's another story.

I registered the hollowsun.co.uk domain name a few years ago and stuck it on a blogspot protoblog - a blog I started before I knew what blogging was. The blog's first post was an advert for artificial snow for a client at work. The blogspot's last posts document the reasons for a break-up, and are like an electronic scar. I cannot look at it now.

And so it is this blog is www.hollowsun.co.uk 's new home, using Posterous as its CMS which my more web-savvy experience finds to be the easiest way to blog in nice looking surroundings.

Blogging is hard - because its hard to keep it going about a subject you are not totally OCD about for longer than 6 months. And so, with true conceit, I've decided the only thing I really obsess about is myself, so I may as well just blog about myself and my thoughts.

Because one thing I've decided recently is that to live fully you have to create, and creating is more than just having clever ideas, its making those ideas live and breathe. I'm afraid that I haven't created anything of worth up to now. I have lots of "potential" but I'm fast running out of the opportunities to make that potential mean anything worthwhile.

By worthwhile, I mean creating something that has an influence on the universe. I would prefer if this is a positive influence, although that is another story again.

A few promises I have made to myself for this blog - that I will be totally honest, and will write for an audience that are my friends. That is another recent revelation for me, that its the people I care about I'm afraid of losing most often. And all fears need to be acknowledged. That's one more story.

All of this is trying to explain what Hollow Sun is. Its cathartic and tired, having just gone through the darkest hour of the last night you will ever see your loved one, looking up together sitting on the shore of a riverbank in Falmouth as the sun rises on a new day.

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