LastThursday

I'm bilingual, so you could say I have two overlapping characters that I occupy. People have mentioned that I have a different timbre to my voice when I speak Spanish. And in my experience there are kind of two different hooks that a lot of things hang off of, my Spanish identity and my British one. I think what happens when expressing different identities is that certain traits are amplified and others diminished. So if you identify strongly with the voice in your head and were to change it, you would express different parts of yourself more strongly and others less so. It's like playing dress up and digging into a box full of different outfits, and then embodying the character that suits the clothing. Changing the voice in your head is like putting on a different outfit. The main point, is that everyone's character is in fact very fluid - and we have a large reservoir of characters we could be. It's just that we chose to express certain traits more than others, out of habit, practice and social pressure.

Except electrons. And the universe, apparently.

Masses (a.k.a energy) distort spacetime. The distortion tells mass how to move. Naturally, that explanation leaves a lot to be desired, like: why does mass distort spacetime? No-one knows. I'd say it's because mass and spacetime are part of the same thing. It should be called massenergyspacetime. But my maths skills are not good enough to come up with a theory. But if massenergyspacetime "exists" then the structure of spacetime should be as complex as the mass in the middle of it. Essentially, the closer you look the more unified things look. Things fall towards each other, not up or down or anything else. But momentum can make objects orbit each other.

Consciouness and infinity and beyond are just words, it's not any of those. Is it possible to understand it all? Yes it's here, right now, just look, feel, listen, taste. Unfortunately, all those are just words too.

@nuwu you seem to be referring to a fractal structure. In terms of life I would say that a fractal accurately captures its essence. It's self-similar in that every generation is similar to the last. But it's also self-similar in that different forms proliferate, i.e. there are many bacteria that are similar, many people that are similar. So life is fractal both temporally and spatially. Each generation is like zooming into the Mandelbrot set, and the entire biome is part of the same fractal. In terms of reality itself, then that is a bit more difficult to apply. I agree that reality is self-similar in that there are aspects of it that are unchanging (i.e. similar). Reality doesn't generally change its nature radically from moment to moment. There is also a sense in which reality "unfolds" from moment to moment, each moment similar in nature to the previous moment. There are also structures and forms and laws that proliferate in reality, repeatedly. The idea of random chance is that of an un-pattern. So it represents a type of chaos which seems to go against the patterning of a fractal. I suppose a fractal can be chaotic in nature and could be said to be (pseudo-)random. I don't know, randomness is a very slippery concept to pin down.

@nuwu I would like to reply to you, but I didn't understand a single thing you wrote. Or is that your point?

1.6km is twenty minutes of walking. So not long at all. If you see someone you don't like, or a dog, cross the road. Kidnapping is exceptionally rare anywhere. You're more likely to be hit by a car.

There are two teachers in a village (somewhere, somewhen). One of the teachers attracts a great number of villagers every day, who gather around him on a hill and answers questions. One villager pipes up and asks "I have heard the next village along eats fish every day. We have never eaten fish. How do we get fish?" The teacher thinks for a minute and then explains that fish live in water, and you would need to build a boat and nets and have a lot of patience. The villager then asks further "What is a boat and a net? And where do we find water?". The teacher goes on to explain all these things at great length. Day after day the villagers gather and ask more questions about fishing. Sometimes there is great debate about which is the best way to find fish. Some villagers even try to convince themselves that they have eaten fish, and others tell them how silly they are because it's not fish they're eating. The other teacher goes out early in the morning before all the villagers are up and wanders widely around the area every day. One day one of the villagers is also up early and notices her walking about and asks her what she is doing. She says "I'm going fishing, would you like to come?". The villager responds "I already know all about fishing.", he pauses, "but I've still never tasted a fish". "Come!" the teacher says, "but you must stay silent and just copy what I do.". Together they walk for what seems a very long time in the darkness. Eventually they reach a great lake. The villager's eyes nearly pop out of his head when he sees a small boat on the shore. The teacher gives him a sharp look and indicates not to say a word! She motions him to get into the boat and inside he can see a net. He runs his fingers over it and laughs with joy. Again the teacher signs for him to be quiet. She pushes the boat out into the lake with the oar and when they are out far enough, she motions him to throw the net into the water. The new fisherman keeps up the practice early every morning. He tells the other villagers all about his fishing and how tasty fish are when cooked over a fire. However, when they ask how he found the fish, he just says "you must come silently with me early in the morning and I will show you". But they don't believe him, and getting up so early every day seems like effort and staying silent is difficult. All they can say is "but we already know about fishing".

I would agree. I would say teleology is not science. Determinism is though. And pure randomness (acausal non-patterned) seems to be accepted in quantum mechanics. I would say science can't do that, since it deals in causalities. Something other than science would have to explain an acausal reality. It's not a failing of science, it's just outside its remit. Science has its limits. But is it though? If you were to try and do it scientifically you would ask the question "is reality acausal"? That's the hypothesis. So how could you test that hypothesis? One way is to "look" for events and happenings without cause. The pure randomness accepted in quantum mechanics is one place. Somewhere else you might look is for is events that have no possible explanation (i.e. after all possible explanations have been exhausted). But there's a huge amount of uncertainty in performing such experiments. Namely, that you can never know if there is a potential cause that you're missing or unaware of (i.e. you can't measure yet or have no theory for). Science would just keep on looking for causes and say "we have more science to do yet, our models are incomplete". Yes. That's the "fiction" part of my "useful fictions". The map is never the territory, even if the map gets more and more useful over time. i.e. useful fictions map onto truth but are not truth itself. I would flip the idea of acausality on its head though. If reality is indeed acausal, then why is science even possible? Why is the illusion of causality present at all? What maintains that illusion and why is it overwhelmingly present? More generally if acausality rules, then why is there a strong semblance of order and pattern to it? Why not meaningless chaos?

Weekdays: beep, Beep, BEEP, hit snooze, rinse repeat x 5 MUST shower. Awake. Get dressed. Make tea, possibly coffee. 9am. Pretend to log on, by saying "hi" to work colleagues on phone (I work from home). Faff about with emails, this forum, other crap. Stretch exercises. Crazy dancing for three songs. Breakfast at 10am. 10:20 think about starting work. 12:30 lunch time walk, 40 minutes (but that's the afternoon already). Weekends: ZzzZzzzZzz 10am MUST shower. Awake. ... the rest is unstructured bliss. Occasional meditation.

From a different perspective, we're all looking to survive. Keeping on staying alive, takes a huge amount of intelligence both tacitly and intentionally and biologically. This can make it seem like people behave in stupid ways or even amorally or criminally - but they're just trying to survive. Survival also extends out to your family or group or nation, and keeping that cohesion also takes a huge amount of social intelligence. Even the dumbest person has enough intelligence to survive - if they didn't they wouldn't be around. So the intelligence of survival happens at many levels and many different ways. Conventional intelligence is just a sliver of all that. Survival forces intelligence because nature is constantly trying to kill us (a.k.a. our biological identities).

Even when Ptolemaic epicycles "maps onto truth" in some way. Kepler's ellipses maps onto truth even better. And Newton's gravitational attraction even more so. And Einstein's general relativity predicts the motion of Mercury more accurately and on and on. Occam's razor only applies in the case where you have two competing theories of equal predictive power. But it's a heuristic only. All this talk of epicycles brings this video to mind:

Easy: Hard:

I appreciate your compliment. Thanks. Scientists can suffer from groupthink (like any other group). This can be both good and bad. There's a fine line between just accepting any old hypothesis and accepting none. Science needs a certain amount of inertia so that it moves smoothly towards some sort of truth or at least useful fictions. Groupthink is like a shock-absorber. However, too much groupthink can create too much inertia and that causes stagnation. In any group most will toe-the-line but you'll always get mavericks who break the rules: you just need a good balance of both. Usefulness is usefulness, it's largely dependent on context. In the context of science usefulness would be predictive power. For example is the predictive power of the idea of evolution better than the predictive power of intelligent design? For an everyday guy, usefulness would be something like "does this allow me to live a more comfortable life?". If a scientific theory has good predictive power, then you could say it maps onto truth more closely than one that doesn't. Where scientists can go wrong is believing their useful fictions to be the thing itself. For example the universe is clearly not made of mathematical equations, but I've seen some scientists say exactly this. I wouldn't bash science too much though. Our very existence and survival depends on it in modern society. And without it, we wouldn't be on here.

These guys are excellent:

A protein is neither correct or incorrect. Either it improves the survival rate of the organism-as-a-whole or it reduces it. A protein's structure could be sub-optimal but still improve the organism's chances. For example maybe a protein helps as an anti-freeze to stop an organism's blood freezing solid. The protein gets mutated (say just one amino acid), and now it works 0.1% better than before. The protein now confers a better survival advantage, even if it's very slight. One protein by itself can indeed do something. Most chemicals react given the right environment. It could even catalyse its own production - auto-catalysis is a thing and this sort of thing is being investigated as a potential precursor to life. For example, oxidation (fire) can catalyse its own production (more fire). Although I would probably agree that life probably started out with a soup of many proteins and other chemicals and freely floating amino acids. But probably the proteins were very short and fairly ineffective at catalysing reactions. But over time, evolution mutated them, and cut away the chaff, to leave the more effective proteins. This fixation on just randomly throwing together flagella and proteins by intelligent design enthusiasts, doesn't take the whole picture into account. It's a misrepresentation of what evolution says: big numbers and lots of time and the mechanisms of death can produce complexity. And it does it in tiny incremental steps. If you're looking for intelligence in evolution, then they are the complexity of environments, and the "design" of atoms. I would add that all explanations are fictions. The question is whether the fictions are useful in some way. I'd say evolution is a more useful fiction than intelligent design. But if something more useful than evolution comes along, I'd happily believe that. Saying that, in terms of explaining reality itself, evolution doesn't cut it and probably ID has a better chance there. But some have tried to apply evolutionary ideas to multiverses. The coldest temperature you can have is absolute zero at -273 degrees Centigrade (zero Kelvin). The emission and absorption of light is done by electrons which don't care about the temperature as such. Temperature is related to the movement of the atoms (kinetic energy). However, movement can interfere with the structure of a material, which can affect its ability to interact with light. Less temperature equals less kinetic energy and less movement of atoms, which can change a material's properties. Kinetic energy of atoms can and does transfer into its electrons absorbing that energy and they in turn can emit light. The structure of the material is more important than it's temperature in terms of light. This has more to do with gravity than matter per se. Gravity bends space, more gravity more bending. Space can get bent so much that light can't move fast enough to escape the curvature - and an event horizon gets formed. The event horizon is the boundary where the curvature gets too much for light to escape. The upshot is that no light can get out from beyond the event horizon and you get a "black hole". Although, you can get Hawking radiation which does escape the event horizon. This is probably mostly photons of low energy light. It happens because you get virtual pairs of photons being produced (they're produced all the time due to the uncertainty principle). One of the photons in the pair is on one side of the event horizon, the other on the other. So one photon can escape (and become real) and the other it trapped. The photon that escapes is Hawking radiation.

All matter both emits and absorbs light. You can verify this for yourself quite easily. For example if you heat a bit of metal to a high enough temperature, it will emit an orange light. Conversely, if you get a magnifying glass and concentrate the sun's light through it, you can burn paper (an oxidation reaction). More specifically, the whole of the photographic industry relies on matter being light-sensitive (both digital and analogue photography). Silver halide particles react to light and go black, which is used as the "negative" in photography. Here's a list of especially light-sensitive chemicals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Light-sensitive_chemicals So I wouldn't say it was particularly difficult to get something to be light-sensitive, it's just a matter of degree. How would light-sensitivity arise in an organism? All organisms are nearly exclusively built up from proteins - with a sprinkling of other chemicals. Proteins are carbon polymers, a polymer being a long string of repeating units of some type of chemical. Plastics are carbon polymers. Proteins are long one-dimensional strings of repeating amino acids. There are twenty types of amino acid in nature, each amino acid having its own structure. Each different type of protein (there are many thousands of them), has its own unique sequence of amino acids. Proteins have a strong tendency to curl up and form three-dimensional structures. In general there is one or maybe several stable three-dimensional structures for each type of protein. In that way, each different sequence of amino acids, maps into a defined set of three-dimensional structures. If you change the sequence, you change the final structure. The genius of proteins is that their three-dimensional structures give them different capabilities. Most chemical reactions involve varying chemical shapes, and proteins can fit around these shapes and speed up or slow down chemical reactions (i.e. they are catalysts). Pretty much all the activity in a cell for example is chemical reactions mediated by proteins. To change the capabilities of a protein, you would change its sequence of amino acids. This is basically what a mutation is. Some mutations have a small effect on the three-dimensional structure of a protein and so don't affect its abilities much. Other mutations have a large effect. Some mutations might increase the light-sensitivity of the protein, even if slightly (because all matter is light-sensitive). Proteins are not static, but dynamic wobbling structures, much like a liquid. If the effect is large enough, a protein might deform with incoming light and release electrons, which then cascade into other proteins (say forming nerves). Or it might change shape and increase the production of some other chemical (say a hormone). Here is some info on light receptive proteins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_protein So. Random mutations imply changes to sequences of amino acids, which imply changes to the three-dimensional structure of the protein, which imply changes to its capabilities. Some of those capabilities include light-sensitivity.

Let me see if I can try and clarify what I was getting at. Wish me luck... Imagine you have an organism with no eyes. It has skin and a few limbs, whatever. By some random mutation its offspring has a patch of light-sensitive skin somewhere (there is plenty of chemistry which is light sensitive, so it's not super surprising). The question arises: is this patch of light-sensitive skin a new function of the organism? And, what is that function? It could be that the patch does nothing whatsoever. The organism neither reacts to light hitting its skin there and there is no cost to the organism to maintain it. In other words there is no difference in survival value and so the mutation will proliferate into further descendant populations. Evolution can and does keep mutations that have no affect on survival value: junk DNA, useless organs etc. Say there's another mutation which then connects nerves to that patch of light-sensitive skin. Aha! Do we have a new function? Not necessarily. Even though the organism could react to light hitting its skin now, the rest of its nervous system is not wired up to react in a way that will increase its survival value. Nevertheless, the new mutation gets passed down to descendants, because it doesn't affect the survival rate. Then we get a third mutation, which connects the nerve messages from the light-sensitive skin, to nerves in muscles in its limbs. This time, whenever the light level drops on its skin, the limbs kick the organism away from the shadow. Now we have a function. This greatly increases the organism's survival value and so nearly all its descendants will maintain all three mutations. Note how each individual mutation by itself does not confer a new function, but all three have to be present together to increase survival of the organism. When exactly did the new function arise, which mutation was it? And what was the function of each mutation? It's not at all clear. In each case the mutation could have had no function at all, or required many other mutations for it to be useful whatsoever. All that happens is the phenotype (waveform) drifts through mutation, and occasionally those mutations come together to increase an organism's survival rate. Function is just what a biologist uses to reduce the problem of complexity in understanding an organism, but it's not real.

You don't need a key, just tunnel out. It's hard work and you can't tell anyone and you have to cover the tunnel with a poster, but it can be done. But seriously, it all starts with self-awareness. The first step is to realise you're in a prison. Then you use the shovel of self-awareness to dig through the brick wall of the traps and tricks of the mind. Self-awareness allows you to step outside your normal every day mind, and observe it. Everyone has the potential for self-awareness, but something needs to activate it. Unfortunately, what that something is isn't in your control.

Why do I hate washing dishes? It's a point of contention with my landlady. My mini dishwasher is on its last legs, leaks a bit and constantly gets blocked. She can't seem to find a replacement in that size and therefore has done nothing about the problem. I can fix the blockage but it's a process to unbolt and extract the dishwasher every time. I can't fix the slight leak. When I was a teenager my parents began to ask to me and my sister to help with washing dishes. I always resented being pulled away from whatever I doing (normally coding) to do something so boring and mundane and utterly pointless. As soon as the pain was over, I would go back to whatever I had been doing before. In the way only teenagers can be, I never understood why my parents (basically my mum) couldn't just do it themselves, they did everything else anyway! My sister had a knack for getting away with not doing the dishes, and I resented her for it. During and after university I had a lot of practice with washing dishes. It was often a kind of Mexican stand off with flat mates as to who would fold first and do the dishes. At one point I decided to take decisive action and start hiding dishes and cutlery over time just to force a resolution. Eating out was often the only and best option. Even when I entered a proper relationship after university and became a fully fledged adult, my girlfriend and I would roster the dish-washing, alternating each day along with cooking food. Nobody actively choses to do dishes. Now I live by myself and I'm forced to wash dishes at least once a day. They tend to live on the side, draining for most of the day. Even when the dishwasher was functional, I would often just pluck dishes to use out of the dishwasher and only occasionally put everything away. It's my way of rebelling. When I have visitors to stay, I feel inclined to behave and pretend as though I keep an immaculate flat, with dishes living where they should be. It's an image I wish to maintain, a white lie to entertain, my mask. Part of me also, nominally, abhors clutter. Doing dishes is a metaphor for everything in my life I have to do, but would not do if I had a choice. However. Repetition and mundanity does have something to teach me. It's that the pain reduces over time. I know in the back of my mind that washing dishes is essential for my health and that I don't like the visual noise of disorder. It's also something that actually doesn't take too long. It's pain is amplified in my mind's eye. It shows me that many things I find painful in my life are overamplified by my mind. Also, instead of just playing lip-service to my so called minimalist outlook on life, that actual minimalism is simply a lot of repetition and mundanity: after all not having appliances at all is minimalist. I could go into all the Zen like meditations on washing dishes, but honestly I don't meditate doing dishes, everything but. My food cooks, my radio blares and I try and get it over and done with as quickly as I can. Fuck dishes.

Thread resuscitation.

Warning lots of analogies incoming: Thinking in terms of function doesn't give the full picture. The analogy is with music. The functions might be likened to the instruments in a band, a guitar, drums etc. But the song they play itself can be encoded into a continuous waveform. Seen from that viewpoint, changing the waveform even slightly, would change the sound of all the functions at once. That's what I meant by evolution being holistic. Each organism has X chance of survival (taken as an average). That means that all the organisms that don't make it and go extinct, take their particular waveform with them - to stretch the analogy. Over time the organisms that are left are those that have the greatest chance of survival and their waveforms become the most prevalent. So the waveforms will get shaped by the environment of the organism, certain parts of it being amplified and other parts diminishing. It's like evolving a key to fit a lock, the shape of the key changes to fit the lock. How do new functions arise? They don't as such. A "function" is just a product of the reductionist way of seeing things. Each and every organism is slightly different (thanks to random mutation) and unique. Therefore each and every organism has a different holistic function (singular), this is just the shape of the waveform or key if you like. Like a key it's the entire shape that matters, and some keys will fit better than others. As the waveform of an organism is shaped over time, it will appear as if new structures arise in the organism (new instruments). But it's a mirage, what you hear is actually the waveform changing, the static of mutation gets amplified into new sounds.

Until you wake up.

Not in general. Evolution works without having a goal, all it does is apply the procedure. The environment the organism finds itself in is what sets the likelihood of reproduction. Evolution is blind in that respect. However, organisms do modify their environments. So it's completely possible that an organism modifies its environment so that it has a greater chance of survival over other organisms. In that case evolution would favour (i.e. increase the chances of reproduction) of those organisms that modify their environment in that way. Evolution is holistic, so it can also include the environment. I mean, this is exactly what humans do, their modify their environment to increase their chances of survival. But, it would be wrong to say that it is a goal of evolution. Chimps don't have their own civilisations for example. In a sense evolution isn't a thing. The process whereby organisms reproduce to the next generation gets called evolution. Because fundamentally it uses a very simple and mechanical procedure to sort a deck of cards. It's not making active decisions in the moment like a real intelligence would. It's completely deterministic. Dumb=deterministic in this case.