Nature

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Bing-bing-bing! Ricochet Robert.

I’m in a rather unusually bad amount of pain this morning, even for me, so please excuse me if my thoughts are somewhat incoherent or distracted or grumpy-seeming.  Though I don’t know how you would be able to tell if I’m grumpier than usual.

It’s Monday yet again, and it’s only been two days since my last post, not three, because I worked on Saturday, and on that day, I also wrote a very angry blog post.  I think some people might have found the degree of malice I expressed on Saturday disquieting or at least just not good, which I can understand.  I tend to think of such terrible things a lot more often than most people do (though I share them only infrequently); it’s one of the reasons I find my own company unpleasant.

But, of course, I’ve tried to compensate for my dark tendencies by doing as much good in the world as I’ve been able to do, such as by becoming a doctor.  I’ve never actually acted on any of my darkest impulses and dreams, except when I write horror stories, or when I write non-horror stories with horrible elements in them.

I guess maybe that’s one of the things that’s been therapeutic for me about writing fiction.  Maybe the trouble is right now that I don’t have a good outlet for my terrible thoughts.

Of course, I know that the idea of thoughts and emotions as “substances”, as if some manner of fluids, which can build up and need release is not merely incorrect, but is not even a good analogy for how emotions and other neurological states work.  This is part of why meditation is far more effective against stress and tension than is, for instance, the often counterproductive notion of catharsis.

Of course, sometimes things that work well for neurotypicals don’t work nearly as well for those on the autism spectrum*.  For instance, there is apparently some reasonable evidence that cognitive behavioral therapy, which often works quite well for neurotypicals with depression, is not as effective and can even be counterproductive for autistic people; we already tend to over-self-evaluate our cognitions, and so the tricks and workarounds of CBT often are not merely redundant but miss the issues entirely.

Along a line of possibly similar nature, I’ve written before about how meditation often serves to reduce my anxiety but at the same time worsens my depression.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, I think it’s all a matter of neurological states‒or neurohumoral states if you want to be slightly more precise.  I’ve spent nearly my whole life interested in such things; still, I have found neither evidence nor argument that has so far persuaded me that there’s any significant credence to the notion that humans are anything but temporary patterns of matter/energy, “spontaneously” self-assembled like any termite mound/colony or beehive/swarm**.

Once that pattern breaks because it can no longer sustain itself, due to injury or age or what have you, there is nothing more to it; it’s a hurricane that has passed.  There can be records and traces of its passing, and the damage it has done can linger for a long time, but there is no “afterlife” for weather patterns.

People are more complicated than hurricanes, at least in some senses, I will admit that.  But more intricate complexity doesn’t tend to make things more durable; it makes them more fragile, ceteris paribus.

Of course, all else is almost never equal.  Nevertheless, it’s often useful to consider complex matters as partial differential equations in more than one variable***; one explores the equation by holding all but one variable constant and differentiating or integrating along only one variable at a time.  As long as one thinks carefully about such things and never forgets that one is holding the other variables constant‒and by not forgetting, hopefully avoiding the oversimplification of one’s model of reality‒one can penetrate a great deal by recognizing when powerful tendencies persist even given the fact that other variables can influence matters.

For instance, the metallicity**** of stars influences the size at which they undergo certain levels of fusion, which is why it is thought that the earliest stars had different lifespans and luminosities relative to mass than later stars (like our sun).  But they still, overall, behave like stars, and the bigger ones shine brighter and last a shorter time than the less massive ones.  They are more alike than unalike, the narcissism of small differences notwithstanding.

Well…that tangent, or series of tangents, sure took me down unexpected paths!  But I guess that’s the nature of tangents; in any nonlinear but continuous function (even one as simple as a circle), there are a functionally infinite number of possible tangents.

I think that’s the right mathematical metaphor; isn’t it?  I guess it doesn’t much matter.  I’m just expressing my highly stochastic thoughts (I doubt they’re truly random) as they come.  But they would probably follow different courses if I did not express them in this fashion.

I hope your own thoughts are less troublesome to you than mine are to me and that you are at least at some degree of peace with yourselves and with each other.  You might as well be, though I know that’s not enough to guarantee it.  Still, do what you can, okay?

*Which I am, as you may know; I have written at least in passing about my recent, quite late, diagnosis.

**I don’t mean “like” here as “the same as” but rather “in the same fashion as”.

***My terminology is a bit sloppy here, but I’m not trying to be mathematically rigorous, I’m just trying to get my thoughts across with some clarity and accuracy.

****To astronomers/astrophysicists, a “metal” is any other element but hydrogen and helium (this no doubt irks chemists).  The earliest stars would have been almost entirely hydrogen and helium, certainly to start off.  Mind you, even later generation stars like the sun are still by far mostly hydrogen, but seemingly small “contaminants” can have noticeable effects on big systems, as in the fact that water vapor and carbon dioxide markedly affect Earth’s atmosphere and surface temperature despite being present in tiny amounts compared to nitrogen and oxygen.

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Celebrate good times? Come ON.

I had a notion this weekend that I would write this blog post on Sunday afternoon/evening and set it up to publish itself‒so to speak‒this morning.  Then, I would use this morning to perhaps review an/or rebegin HELIOS, or maybe to work on Outlaw’s Mind or DFandD.  I even thought I could write any of those‒especially HELIOS‒on my smartphone, since I have them on Google Docs as well as MS Word.

So I thought, anyway.  When I looked, though, I found that I don’t actually appear to have any version of HELIOS on my Google drive, so it must either be on Word or I never typed in the little bit I had of it.  Of course, I could have just decided to restart and bring one of my spiral bound notebooks and write in that.  The only trouble with doing it that way, if I write during my morning commute, is that I eventually have to retype everything into one of my computers or smartphones.

Now, I have never done the thing* of handwriting a first draft and then copying it into a phone, but I have done that with handwriting and computer word processors.  That method has produced some of my best stuff (by some measures), including Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, Paradox City, and even part of The Vagabond, though that last one was written mainly on WriteNow on a Mac SE.  So, maybe the handwritten-to-smartphone idea could actually work pretty well, now that I think about it.

Anyway, all that’s fairly moot, because I did not in fact write this blog post on Sunday afternoon nor yet on Sunday evening.  I am writing it, as I usually do, in the morning, in the midst of my commute to the office, which is so effing early, but which is nevertheless far later than when I woke up.

I’m more than a bit disappointed in myself for failing to carry through with that idea, but it’s easy to think of ideas that seem so doable when you first think of them.  And they are doable, of course.  Not only is it physically possible for me to have written this post yesterday evening and to set a precedent of doing the blog posts in the evening and writing fiction in the morning, it’s banal.  If you told someone that had happened, they would be unlikely to do much more than shrug and say something like a noncommittal “cool”, before going on their way.

But as we all know‒or should know‒it’s much easier to intend to do things in the future than it is to muster the motivation to do them in the moment when one was hoping to do them.  There are many shifting, often conflicting, drives in the human** psyche, and our actions are born of a kind of vector sum of all those “forces” in any given moment.

But not only do those forces shift due to things as seemingly mundane as one’s current state of appetite or fatigue, but they are also affected by what one has done immediately before; for the outcome of that vector sum in one instant feeds back on the system in numerous places, changing the sum (I was going to write “changing the calculus” but I thought that might be mathematically confusing and even misleading, since I am not discussing calculus) with every new iteration.  These iterations and changes aren’t quite happening on the scale of the Planck time***, but they happen quickly‒certainly at least at the “speed of thought”, whatever that might be.

Even the physiological, hormonal, energy state of the body from moment to moment changes those vectors, sometimes a great deal.  If you find yourself needing to use the bathroom while you’re trying to accomplish some task, it can certainly change the state of your concentration.  And if you should suddenly begin to have difficulty breathing, it will distract you from pretty much anything else.

That’s why on airplanes they tell you that, in case of cabin depressurization, if you’re traveling with someone who needs help putting on the oxygen mask, put yours on first, before you help your companion.  If you can’t breathe, your ability to help anyone else is going to tank very rapidly.  We can live weeks to months without food, days without water, but only minutes without air.

On a less extreme angle, if one is hypoglycemic (for whatever reason), it strongly affects all the functions of one’s body, particularly one’s neuroendocrine system.  Less extreme but more persistent issues can sabotage one’s focus upon much else.

I don’t need to tell you, probably, that pain makes it much harder to focus and bring effort to bear on other things.  This is one of the most annoying aspects of chronic pain:  one does not quite ever become accustomed to it, because that would miss the whole biological point of pain.  Making pain something you could ignore would be a bit like making a fire alarm that plays soft, easy-listening elevator music at unobtrusive decibel levels.  It would be less annoying, but being burned to death in a fire is a bigger issue, even if it isn’t very likely.

Of course, if your (typical) fire alarm is stuck on, you may not ever be able completely to ignore it.  You also will not know when there is a real fire. Or at least you will be less likely to know.  And since that can potentially be a matter of life and death, the chronic alarm, like chronic pain, is in its own manifold ways life-threatening.

All that is very tangential to my original point, which was that I am writing this blog today, not writing fiction (at least not this morning on my commute).

Oh, well.  If there’s one day I can let myself get away with slacking a bit, I guess it’s today.  I hope you all have a good one.

*How’s that for clever, descriptive writing?

**Or whatever I am.

***Though the processes that underlie them do.

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“And by a sleep to say we end the heartache…”

I am really groggy this morning.  I feel as if I slept very poorly, or at least not nearly enough.  Of course, both of those things tend to be true pretty much every night on which I don’t literally sedate myself.  But somehow I’m really feeling it today.

Usually, I’m so tense overall that even though I sleep poorly, I’m still alert bordering on hyperalert.  Maybe now I’ve had such poor sleep for so long that it’s finally catching up with me and wearing me down.  Or perhaps one might say it is Breaking Me Down.  [That was a shameless plug.  BTW, my songs are also available on Spotify and iTunes, and you can choose them as background music for Instagram and (so I’m told) even TikTok.]

Of course, it may be that I actually slept better than usual last night, but it was simply not enough of such better sleep, so I’m feeling very mentally tired because I started to get some rest, but have by no means made up for my deficit.  Does that make sense?

I suppose it doesn’t matter much.  I guess if I somehow develop better sleep and begin to be better rested, it will gradually produce some effects.  I don’t know what such effects might be.  Perhaps such sleep would improve my creativity, my energy, my optimism, what have you.

Maybe I would start writing fiction again.  Maybe I would start writing music again.  Maybe I would start drawing and painting again.  Maybe I would find the energy really to study the physics and mathematics I want to study, and even to master more of the science of biological and machine intelligence.

And maybe I would catch the flying pig to go take a skiing trip in Hell.  Unfortunately, I do not know how to ski (except in principle).  Also, snowboarding looks like it would be more fun.  In any case, I think such activities would be very hard on my joints and back.  But who knows?  Maybe if I were able to get enough sleep for long enough, even my chronic pain would improve.

We know how crucial sleep must be, because every single creature with a nervous system seems to do it, even though it puts us all into a vulnerable state at least part of every day.  If there were a way around it, you’d think that some creature would have developed that capacity, but the closest we have is things like dolphins and other marine and aquatic creatures that sleep with half their brains at a time.

That’s pretty remarkable and cool, when you think about it.  I know that not just marine mammals and some reptiles do this, but also some birds do it.

I also had Mark Reed do something akin to this in Mark Red.  As he developed into what he was becoming (a demi-vampire) he stopped needing to sleep at all, and Morgan (a full vampire) speculated that maybe during the day his vampire half slept, while at night his human half slept.

Of course, he was a supernatural being, so parallels with even the most esoteric of real creatures are at best quite a stretch.  It’s all pretty much a stretch for me, as well, though I am certainly not a supernatural being.  I’m quite weird, but that’s not the same.

Mind you, as I’ve said before, in reality there can be no such thing as the supernatural (at least as I would straightforwardly define the term) because anything that actually exists‒no matter how bizarre or inexplicable‒is part of nature, and so is natural.  If ghosts exist*, then ghosts are natural.  If vampires exist** then vampires are natural.  If Cthulhu and Azathoth and Nyarlathotep exist***, then they are natural as well.

Nature is big.  It’s not just the biosphere of Earth.  It’s the whole capital-U Universe, by which I mean everything, even if there is a multiverse or many different levels of multiverses.  It’s what I might call the Omniverse, as I did in The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  I had planned on referring to it as the metaverse, starting from well over 20 years ago, but then Fuckerberg stole the term and applied it to his lame-ass would-be virtual reality thing.

Oh, well, what are you gonna do?  I suppose he has his uses.  I don’t know whether his existence is a net positive or a net negative, and such measures are always dependent upon what criteria one uses to judge things, anyway.  And as long as one is fairly rigorous and consistent and careful in applying one’s criteria, I would say that all such evaluations are reasonably valid within their own bailiwicks.  My own frustration, though perhaps likewise valid by those measures, is a bit petty and somewhat pathetic, even from my own point of view.

What else is new?

Not very much, I’m afraid.  Details change from moment to moment, though even that depends to some degree upon one’s perspective.  Certainly no human, nor indeed any manner of finite mind, has ever had or can ever have all the answers.  The best we can do is to try always to increase our knowledge, to improve our understanding.  It may take forever to learn every possible thing there is to know, but what better way could there be to spend eternity?

I hope you all have a good day and a good week, even though you can only learn and improve a finite amount in that time.  It’s good enough.

*They almost certainly do not.

**They also almost certainly do not, unless you count the bats and other blood-eating parasites like mosquitoes and fleas and the Masai people.

***Alas, even these beings almost certainly do not really exist.

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“The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older.”

Okay, well, here we are.  It’s Wednesday.  I don’t know what else there is to say about the day.  I guess…yeah, I don’t know.  It’s another day.  It’s a stretch of (roughly) 24 hours, the specifics depending on whether you’re using solar time or sidereal time or just the “self-contained” UTC time*.

UTC time is kept on a variety of clocks around the world and is based on the oscillations in the hyperfine transition frequency of the Caesium-133 atom.  That frequency has been defined as 9,192,631,770 Hz.  The international measuring community thing, whatever they call themselves, thereby agreed on defining the second as exactly 9,192,631,770 of those Caesium-133 oscillations.

Of course, oscillations of atoms, like all other processes that take time, slow down with increased spacetime curvature and with increasing speed relative to any given observer.  This is why the GPS satellites have to adjust their own time to account for both special and general relativity.  It’s pretty cool; you’re carrying proof of Einsteinian relativity in your smartphone.

You probably already knew that.

Then, of course, once they’ve decided on the precise value of a second‒knowing that the speed of light (or more precisely the speed of causality) is constant‒they then defined the meter as how far light travels (in a vacuum) in⁠ 1/299,792,458⁠ seconds (approximately 30 2/3 “vibrations” of a Caesium-133 atom).  Mind you, two observers moving relative to each other will see their meters as different each from the other, but c’est de la relativité.

It can be easy to imagine that definitions of units in science (and related fields) are not merely arbitrary but circular, almost tautological.  But really, given that these are attempts to codify specific attributes of reality itself, they would almost have to be self-referential with each other to be useful.

The length of a day is something that happens for real.  Thanks to the base 6 and 12 numbering system of the Babylonians, the day was long ago arbitrarily divided into 24 hours, each 60 minutes long, and each 60 seconds long, so a second was 1/(24 x 60 x 60) days or 1/86,400 of a day.

That worked well for a long time, especially since, before Galileo et al, humans couldn’t really measure time very precisely, anyway.  And then, until railroads allowed rapid travel between cities, it wasn’t necessary to worry too much about having the same time in different places.

But eventually that did become useful and necessary for many purposes, and eventually it was realized that a day wasn’t exactly what we were calling 24 hours, and indeed, that the length of a day varied slightly from day to day and year to year; also, a year isn’t a whole number of days long.  Also also, a day could be measured relative to the sun‒which is close enough that a day doesn’t end quite exactly after one full rotation since the Earth moves relative to the sun over the course of a day‒or with respect to distant stars, by which estimate a day comes closer to being exactly one complete rotation.

For most people most of the time, though, this precision, and that upon which it is based, are probably not merely irrelevant but unknown and unguessed.

Likewise, I don’t know how many people know about how Celsius made his temperature scale 100 degrees between the freezing and boiling of water at sea level pressure (a pretty reasonable choice, though I’m led to understand he initially had 100 assigned as the freezing point and 0 the boiling point!).

Then it was discovered that there existed a minimum possible temperature in principle, and they decided to set that scale, the Kelvin scale (named after William Thompson Scale**) using degrees of the same size as Celsius, but with zero defined as‒understandably enough‒absolute zero.

It’s all fairly interesting, if you’re in the right frame of mind.  But, alas, there’s every reason to suspect that all this information will be rendered moot and useless and perhaps even lost as the world winds down, or if life is replaced by artificial intelligence, or everything ends in some other way, as seems more than possible even in the relatively short term.

In any case, the laws of physics, as we know them, seem clearly to predict that the universe will tend toward ever-greater entropy and eventually all life, all structure will end.  Sometimes, I think it cannot happen soon enough for my taste.

Then again, there are cyclic universe proposals, such as Roger Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.  It bases its model on the fact that entropy, though always tending to increase, is not really an absolute quantity, not a substance, and that our universe’s “maximal” entropy may be the next universe’s low-entropy beginning, just on different scales; it doesn’t even require any “inflationary” burst of expansion to explain the uniformity of the CMB, I think.  I haven’t yet finished Penrose’s book about CCC, because though he is a stunningly brilliant mind, his writing can be a bit plodding and dry.

I guess it’s hard for any person to be good at everything, though Penrose has many strengths.  If memory serves, he invented a set of shapes which can be used to tile an infinite plane (in principle) with no gaps and no repeating patterns.  Supposedly this has been proven to the satisfaction of professional geometers, though I am not familiar with that proof.  Still, if it is a mathematical proof, then it is one of those rare things that we know to be certainly true, given its set of axioms.

It’s not necessarily useful in any practical sense, of course.  For instance, I think it’s probably true that any tiling system that can tile an infinite plane without repeating could not be used to tile a closed, finite, simple geometrically shaped portion of a plane‒such as a rectangular room.  I think you would always have to cut some of the tiles as they reach the wall, no matter how big the room is, as long as it is finite.  I do not know this for certain, that’s just my intuition.

Well, I guess I’ve wasted space and time enough here for now.  It’s no more wasteful than has been my entire existence, I guess, but also no less wasteful.  Or is it?  I don’t know.  In any case, for now I will stop wasting your time.

Please have a good day.

*Yes, it’s probably redundant to say “UTC time”, but the order of the acronym is sort of Yoda-esque‒it did not originate with an English term‒so I feel it’s tolerable to use it this way here.

**That’s a joke.  He was really William Thompson, the first Baron Scale***.

***I mean the 1st Baron Kelvin, of course, all joking aside.  A baron scale sounds like some long forgotten and unused (i.e., barren) bit of laboratory apparatus, left for eons, gathering dust in an abandoned world, like the broken statue of Ozymandius.  It’s very sad.

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“I am Jack’s wasted life…”

Well, it’s Monday again, and honestly, I don’t care or see the point…or, well, some other nearby sentiment to those two.  I’m not sure exactly what sentiment I’m trying to convey, really.  I just feel wound up yet worn out.  It’s been a very annoying weekend.

On Friday, I got back to the house to discover that ice accumulation around the “freezer” area in my half-fridge had pushed the door open, which had led to much more accumulation and also dripping condensation.  This is south Florida, after all; there’s a lot of water in the air.  I ended up having to unplug the fridge and just let it all melt, trying to soak up the water with old shirts (There were no spare towels‒I only had two*).

The wet was a bit too much for the shirts to absorb, but I have a strong floor fan, so I turned it toward that task, instead of cooling me.  I had to throw out pretty much everything in the fridge, but that was not much; I don’t ever have many refrigerable foods.  Like the narrator in Fight Club said:  “A refrigerator full of condiments and no food.  How embarrassing.”

Anyway, the rest of Saturday had a lot of drying of the floor, and a walk to the bank.  Not much else of note took place.  I did dust off my PS4 and try to get it going for the first time in a very long time.  I got it to start after a while‒it seemed almost to have atrophied or gone into some electronic rigor mortis or something.  Anyway, I got it updated after I reset my password, and then played two of my favorite games for about ten minutes each before realizing they were not any fun.

Then, Sunday morning when I went to do my laundry, the washer wasn’t working.  I tried to figure out the problem, and at first it seemed to be an electricity issue.  I tried all the circuit breakers, but they were fine, and the ground fault interrupt was also not sprung.  I got out a long extension cord; I had to depower my fridge (and microwave) to use it, but there was nothing in the fridge by then, anyway.

Power was thus supplied, and I hoped the problem was solved, but it was not.  The washing machine was broken.  Despite various interventions, I could not get it to run.

My laundry, with detergent, was just sitting in the machine.  The landlord tried to get a replacement washer out to us as soon as possible, but his guy was busy elsewhere, and of course, it was Sunday.  So my laundry has not been done this week.  I’ve had to buy some new clothes (and new towels) and get out old clothes I don’t usually wear and so on.  It’s very uncomfortable and unpleasant, as well as expensive.

So, my whole routine has been thrown for a loop, and my routine is all that I have anymore.  I went for quite a long walk on Sunday afternoon once it became clear that the washer replacement wasn’t soon arriving.  It was pretty hot out, but the heat index was one to three degrees below body temperature, so at least normal thermoregulation functioned, more or less, though I got a bit of sunburn.

I walked west along 215th Street, AKA County Line Road, until I got to the place where 215th crosses the Florida Turnpike.  I looked down to see how high the overpass was, but it was disappointing.  If it was done right, a person could probably carefully hang and drop, landing with minimal injury beyond a few scrapes.

Even if one were trying to kill oneself by jumping from there, one would have to go head first (doing it just right) and/or rely on getting killed by traffic.  That would be rude; it would not be okay to traumatize some poor shmoe who’s just going somewhere on the turnpike on a Sunday afternoon.

At that point, I turned around and headed back.  I stopped at a convenience store nearby and bought three beverages, all of which I drank before getting back to the house.

To top everything off for the weekend, one of the stray cats I feed, a quite neurotic and paranoid one, and certainly the oldest of her cohort, died overnight.  She had been (apparently) okay earlier in the day, but maybe she had an infection.  I don’t know.  It doesn’t seem to have been a horrible death, and I guess it was pretty fast.  She wasn’t alone, at least.  The other few cats who tend to stay close to the house were nearby and seemed to have kept her company, at least in some sense.

I don’t know.  I’m probably anthropomorphising.  Still, she had more friends (and probably family, really, when you think about the nature of stray cats) around her when she died than I will likely have when I die.  I honestly don’t know if that’s better or worse.  Maybe it’s not good to subject the people you love to your final hours.

Still, I was regretful and sad (still am) that my Dad died while I was en route to see him for the last time.  And I was glad‒or, well, it was a positive thing, anyway‒to be there with my mother when she died, though I don’t think my presence did any actual good for her.  At least my sister wasn’t there alone.  I guess that was pretty clearly good.

I don’t know what the point of all this is, but in a way, that really is the point, and it makes my point:  there is no use in all that I do, such as this blog.  There is no use in anything.  And I certainly am of no use.

Maybe the social media-ites are right and one shouldn’t have to earn the right to exist, but I have never felt, not for one moment in my life, that I deserve anything just because I’m alive, including my life itself.  Nature is not generous or kind, and as far as I can see, nature doesn’t consider anyone or anything to “deserve” to exist.

I certainly don’t.

*Thanks to other recent events reported here, I bought some more.

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I’ll have blogs more relative than this

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again, if you can believe it.  It feels like it was just seven or eight days ago that it was Thursday last time, and here it is again.  I don’t know how this keeps happening.  Weirdly enough, though, from within, this week has felt as though it’s moving very slowly, and yet, it also feels as though Thursday has come again sooner than I expected.

The mind’s time sense is clearly not entirely objective and consistent.  Then again, why would it be?  Extremely precise long-term time-keeping would not have been a particular evolutionary advantage in the ancestral environment, certainly not one worth the inescapable biological (metabolic) cost of maintaining such a thing.

In any case, now we have incredibly precise time-keeping mechanisms which rely on some fundamental and consistent physical laws.  And though time does pass (so to speak) at different rates depending upon one’s relative velocity and the local curvature of spacetime (i.e., gravity), thanks to Einstein, we know how to adjust our disparate measurements of time with enough precision that we can maintain contact with a bunch of satellites in orbit, and they with each other, and use them to “triangulate” our precise position on the surface of the Earth to within a few meters (there’s generally more than one such triangle, thus the scare quotes—there is probably something more like a tetrahedron).

Of course, we don’t quite know completely just what time is, or at least, we don’t know for sure whether it’s fundamental or emergent from a deeper underlying set of physical laws.  We do know, based on General Relativity alone, that time would be in many ways “an illusion”, because simultaneity is not a consistent thing, and what counts as “now” relative to you depends very much on the direction and speed of your travel compared to other people.

From that point of view, all of spacetime in a sense “already” exists, and our experience of change is an illusion produced by the fact that we are within the block of spacetime.  Like characters and events in a movie on a DVD (or in any other stored medium) the events of the future are already laid out for us, and the end of the movie is as real and as permanent as the beginning, even when we watch the movie for the first time and don’t know what’s going to happen.

I think I talked a bit about this phenomenon in a post on Iterations of Zero called “Playing with spacetime blocks”.  If you want a better introduction to the ideas than anything I could give you, Brian Greene described it really nicely in either The Fabric of the Cosmos or The Hidden Reality.  I’m sorry that I don’t recall for certain which of the two books it is, but they’re both really great and are well worth your time.

Now, as it often does, quantum mechanics puts a bit of an onion in the ointment of fixed 4-D spacetime blocks, and the questions it raises depend—or so it seems to me—on which “interpretation” of quantum mechanics one applies.  In the standard version(s), in which there is such a thing as the collapse of the wavefunction when a quantum interaction occurs that leads to decoherence, there is a fundamental unpredictability to the outcome of such interactions when “measured”.

But if the permanence of spacetime as a whole that appears to be implied by General Relativity is correct, even those seemingly unpredictable events, countless numbers of which happen every second of every day in Dorset alone, are actually fixed and unchangeable.  This implies a mechanism of sorts for “superdeterminism”, or so it seems to me.

Of course, the Everettian “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics—which doesn’t require a deus ex machina wavefunction “collapse” that has to be added “by hand” to the calculations—seems to imply that, if spacetime is fixed in the GR sense then the state of being so fixed includes a fixed set of every outcome of every quantum interaction that would lead to so-called branching of the wavefunction of the universe.  That can be put into the works of GR, and it would give spacetime an added dimensionality of sorts—the dimension in which those “branched” paths exist.

But it would leave in the reality that we ourselves could not say which future “we” would experience, because every possible one actually happens; we just experience one at a time, so to speak*.  It would still be deterministic, just not as a “local” experience for those within spacetime.  Reality would be more like a “choose your own adventure” story than a fixed, scripted movie, but as with those books, all outcomes of any path are still fixed ahead of time.

I think I’ve rehashed a lot of the stuff I discussed in that blog post from IoZ, though I haven’t the will and patience right now to go check.  The specifics of my take on things are probably different this time; certainly, I think I understand all of the pertinent subject matter better than I did when I wrote about it before.  So, hopefully, this has given you at least something new.

Whatever the case, I cannot have done any differently than I have—unless I cannot help but do every possible different thing, but each branch of me, being a branch, only experiences its subset of the universe.  Even if, in a sense, you go both left and right at every metaphorical turn, you still only experience one direction.  It’s just that there is more than one of you, in a sense, experiencing each direction itself but unable to experience the other(s).

It’s really wild and cool stuff, isn’t it?  Science is amazing and awesome and fun.  Thomas Dolby sang that She Blinded Me With Science, but it’s really a way of removing blinders, of wiping the lenses of one’s glasses (and eyes) and focusing more precisely and rigorously on what’s really there, i.e., what’s happening whether anyone believes it or is there to experience it or not.

That’s probably enough for now.  I hope every possible version of you—even if there is only one—has a wonderful day today.

TTFN

*Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that it is human (or other creatures’) choices that determine the branching points of Everettian many-worlds, as seems to be implied by the movie Sliding Doors among other things.  It is quantum interactions resulting in decoherence that lead to the “splitting” of the wavefunction, and they are rarely the result of human choices, at least outside of places where experimental physics is done.

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Doff thy name; and for thy name, which is no part of thee, take all my blog.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and I’m going to try to be more upbeat today in my writing.  So, given my track record, I’ll simply now say…

TTFN

Ha ha, just kidding.  I would never let you off that easily.  I don’t, though, really know what I’m going to write today.  Of course, I never really know ahead of time, as you know (ahead of time) if you’ve read this blog for long.  But now we’re doubly ignorant*, because I have to choose from a much narrower realm of things about which to speak:  the Positive (or at least the Non-negative).

I suppose we could talk about electric charge‒that can be positive, if you’ll pardon the pun (and even if you won’t).  But of course, charge, and specifically positive charge, has interesting historical contingencies.  Because, of course, positive and negative are merely chosen terms; there’s nothing inherently “negative” about the charge of an electron, nor is there anything inherently “positive” about a proton.

As I understand it, Benjamin Franklin was the one who named the two charges and who began the convention that current moves from positive to negative along, for instance, a wire supplied by a voltaic pile (or “battery”, another term Franklin coined, according to what I have read and heard).

Of course, it was quite a long time before people discovered that‒oops!‒the moving particle carrying the charge in a flowing current is the electron, the “negatively” charged particle.  So, based on the already widespread convention, current, as described by physicists and engineers (and electricians I presume), flows in the opposite direction from the actual charge carrier that’s moving.

It’s a bit like relating stars’ intensity by describing how dark they aren’t.  And it turns out, given that the magnitude scale for stars indicates brighter stars by smaller/more negative logarithmic numbers, that’s actually‒in a sense‒how it’s done.  This is also due to historical contingencies.

These sorts of things happen a fair amount.  Remember when VHS beat out Betamax because it was basically first to the market, even though pretty much all reputable experts agreed that Beta was the better, more reliable, clearer, lighter-weight format?  Once people get used to something, they often don’t want something new, even if it’s better.  I get it, of course‒unnecessary change stresses me out severely‒but it’s definitely unfortunate.

It occurs to me now that the “demotion” (really just the redesignation) of Pluto from planet to “dwarf planet” was a rare exception to this, when humans, recognizing that the terminology they had been using was not ideal, changed it.  Of course, this was the work of an international astronomical society, a group of scientists, so certainly it wasn’t a typical situation or decision.

It also was basically a matter of necessity**.  Several other Kuiper Belt objects similar to Pluto had been discovered, some more massive than Pluto, and all with very elongated, non-circularish orbits (like Pluto’s), so either there were going to be a slew of highly irregular planets with highly eccentric orbits, outnumbering the “older” and more orderly planets, or we were going to have to call these things something else.

It’s useful to remember that the names and categories that we put on things are just our names and categories.  They are not arbitrary, at least not if they are useful; but they are our designations, like the little bits of code that let operating systems know where to find programs and files on a computer’s disk memory.  They let us talk to each other about things and address them with consistency and rigor, so that we can better understand them.

But Pluto doesn’t care whether we call it the ninth planet or a dwarf planet or a cartoon dog.  It doesn’t care if we call it Pluto or Hades or Osiris or Hel or Mandos.  It doesn’t have any idea what we call it or how we “define” it.  It doesn’t have any ideas at all, as far as anyone can tell.  It’s not the sort of thing that has ideas or cares about things.  To quote Mister Spock (who was not speaking about Pluto) “It is, essentially, a great rock in space”***.

For nearly 4.5 billion years, Pluto‒like Jupiter’s moons, like Ceres, like the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud and so on‒was just there, and no one knew it was there, no one had seen it, no one was aware of it (as far as we know, anyway).  Intelligent awareness does not cause things in the universe to be; rather, things in the universe being and doing what they do sometimes, rarely, cause intelligent awareness, at least in one tiny place in the cosmos.

BTW, you are in that place and you are one of those intelligent awarenesses, in case you didn’t know that.  But I suspect you already did know that.

It’s quite the rarefied club to which to belong.  Even if there are countless intelligent species in the universe (however one might reasonably define intelligence) they must nevertheless be a tiny, petite, and wee part of all the stuff in the universe, at least for now.  In principle, that could change eventually, and intelligence could come to dominate the universe, but that’s probably a long way off, if it’s going to happen at all.

It can be hard to be optimistic about that possibility sometimes, given the state of humanity, which always seems abysmally stupid.  But remember, the smarter ones among humans have an advantage, the greatest advantage we have seen in our world:  they are smart.

And with that, for real this time:

TTFN

*I know, if there are fewer things from which to choose, one is in principle less ignorant, since there are fewer unknowns, the entropy is smaller, etc.  However, sampling from these spaces is not random; the negative concept-space is more well known and thus less random (and more likely to be chosen) than the positive space, about which I know but little.

**Not to be confused with the question of the necessity of matter.  That’s a whole sort of “metacosmological” notion.

***I know, I know, Pluto is largely made of water ice.  Trust me (or not), at the temperatures of Pluto, water is a rock.  And at the temperatures and pressures of Titan, methane is the stuff of lakes and streams (i.e., it is a liquid).  And at the temperature of the interior of the sun, tungsten is a plasma…or so I suspect.

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What title would be appropriate?

I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer, because I have a new backpack (the old one was really starting to fail, and has been for quite some time—I can relate, and I wish I could replace myself so easily) and it does a better job with the weight, however minor, of the little computer than the old one did.  Also, I just didn’t feel like dealing with the stupid little engine of distraction that is the “smartphone” today.

Ugh, it’s so stupidly muggy already here in south Florida at a quarter to five in the morning that the sweat around my eyes is fogging up my reading glasses while I just sit here and try to type.  Why do people live here?

Okay, well, I know why I live here, and it was because I was trying to accommodate others in the past—people I love, not just anyone—and so I was willing to go with their flow and go away from anywhere where I had long-term connections and such like.  So, I came here to America’s syphilitic dong, which harbors, or has harbored, such parasitic animalcules as Donald Trump, Pam Bondi, Dickless Scott, Michael McAuliffe, Ron DeSantis, and who knows how many others.  What a shit hole.

Mind you, the neighborhood in which I currently live is quite pleasant in many ways, though I cannot consider it home.  It’s extremely multi-ethnic and very community spirited, at least as far as I can see.  People keep out of each other’s business, they take care of their stuff, they take out their garbage, they mow their lawns, all that.  And the houses, though they and the yards tend to be quite small, were clearly built in a time when it was considered normal to construct dwellings that more or less laugh at hurricanes.  Full cinder-block walls on smallish scales make for structures that do not readily move in response to anything but a direct-hit nuclear attack.

I’m really exhausted, and it’s only just the beginning of the day.  I’ve been exhausted for so long now that I can’t readily remember a time when I did not feel exhausted.  I can remember that I have experienced times in the past when I was not exhausted, but I don’t remember what it feels like.  So often, it seems that I surely cannot endure much longer, that I surely must collapse at any moment, that I must just crumble to the ground, unconscious.

But biology is my enemy here.  Living organisms are selected to be prone to continue, since there’s very little natural selection based benefit in being able to choose to shut down at will.  Any being with such a capacity would be less likely to leave behind offspring than those whose bodies simply continued until there was no way for them to do so, or until something else killed them.

I hate it here.  And I don’t mean just where I am right now, though it does apply.  I hate it in south Florida, I hate it in America (a shocking and new realization to me), I hate it on Earth, I hate being in this stupid universe.  I cannot say that I hate everything about it, of course.  I love my children, I love my sister and brother, and I even have a few distant friends who matter to me.  But for the most part—the overwhelmingly “most” part—things here are nauseatingly pathetic.

I don’t just mean humans, by the way.  I’m not one of those idiots who romanticizes animals as innocent and pure and lovely, imagining that they would live in harmony with each other if not for humans.  That’s puerile nonsense.  Anyone who thinks that is mistaken and/or delusional.  This, to me, is the most annoying flaw in The Matrix:  the fact that Agent Smith says and seems to believe that other animals achieve some form of self-imposed equilibrium with their environments.  I think a sentient AI would not be prone to make such an idiotic mistake, but maybe I’m wrong.  It’s not as though I’m not an idiot, too.

But animals don’t choose to be in equilibrium with their ecosystems.  The equilibria are forced upon them (when they happen at all) by death, by disease, by starvation and predation, by famine, by pestilence.  They no more choose to be in equilibrium than the various atoms and molecules in a complex chemical chain reaction choose to be in their equilibria.

Humans are merely more competent than all other creatures (on Earth) have ever been, and so are capable of pushing their environments farther than any others.  That is, unless you count the earliest photosynthesizing organisms, which probably produced the greatest environmental catastrophe the world has ever known—the release of free oxygen in vast quantities, changing the atmosphere and the very crust of the very planet, killing off the majority of life forms until those that remained adapted and became addicted to this new atmospheric drug.

Okay, that last bit of that last sentence was highly melodramatic and judgmental.  I was trying to make a point about how non-innocent natural things are*, but I fell into rhetoric, and that actually cheapens one’s arguments if one is dealing with dispassionate interlocutors.  Then again, when does one ever actually deal with such creatures?

Anyway, life is dominated by suffering and by aggression of one kind or another, because nature overall does not tend to reward indiscriminate kindness.  Humans are, ironically, the only species that seems even capable of the “outside” view, of a compassion and thought for the future and for the suffering of others that goes beyond their local, personal, and even species-specific circumstances.  And they are also the only species that can be seen to vilify itself.

Weirdly enough, it is the “good guys”, or those who try to be good guys, those who consider that worthy of aspiration, who are most often subject to criticism, including self-criticism; certainly they are the only ones responsive to it.  If you criticize narcissistic assholes, they really don’t care.  They’re not trying to be “good” in anyone else’s eyes.  They are already great in their own minds.  They already love themselves.  Just imagine trying to get your average cat to do something by appealing to its guilt, and you will get an inkling of what I mean.

Self-esteem is overrated.  I’m not saying it’s valueless, but it is selling at a much higher price than it is worth, like a vastly overinflated stock for a corporation so leveraged that it could move the Earth if it could find a fulcrum and a place to stand.  A little self-criticism is good for everyone, at least if they want to be anything other than a force for destruction, decay, and patheticness**.

I don’t know.  Maybe destruction is the better way.  Creation, and creativity in general, certainly hasn’t served me very well.

Now, in closing:  I didn’t walk or bike to the station today.  I needed a physical rest.  Hopefully, if I can muster the energy, I will do one of the two things tomorrow.  But even thinking about it right now makes me feel out of breath.  I don’t feel short of breath; I’m not anxious, I’m not tremulous.  I’m just without vigor and cannot readily imagine having any.

Oh, well.  Life sucks.  Have a good day.

*Either everything and everyone is innocent, or nothing and no one is.  I mean this on a general scale, not regarding specific uses of the term relating to legal and criminal concepts.  I’m using the term from a fundamental, ethical/moral underpinning kind of way.  No one made themselves or their circumstances or their nature or their environments, and “free will” is a childish chimera.  As Eric Draven said, “Victims…aren’t we all?”

**Apparently that’s not a word, but “pathos” doesn’t carry the connotations I desired here.  Maybe “contemptibility” would be better?

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Only the truly continuous is infinitely divisible

Well, it’s Friday, the last day of another work week—the first full week of August (or Sexember, if you prefer) in 2025.  And here I am writing things that, so far, are not only trivial but banal.  Perhaps, as I go along, I will write something more interesting and surprising, but so far, I’m not impressed with myself.  I guess these things happen.

I did not end up riding my new bike back to the house last night, because there were thunderstorms in the area, particularly down by where I live.  I’m not too intimidated by riding a bike in the rain, but it’s a new bike, and its configuration is different than the type to which I am used, and it is slightly wobblier than my normal, so I felt it wasn’t a great idea to ride it five miles in the rain.  It turned out the rain was almost over by the time I got to my train stop, but it was nevertheless still quite wet and puddly, and I probably was wise-ish to avoid riding in it.

Still, it’s slightly frustrating.  Hopefully, today it won’t be an issue, because it would be a shame to miss the whole weekend with it by the house.  There are supposed to be thunderstorms today again, but they are expected earlier in the day than yesterday, and the weather is predicted to clear by early evening.  That should be fine, at least.

Of course, weather prediction is never perfectly precise—Chaos Theory being applicable and all that—but forecasts done for only twelve hours or so in the future are likely to be much more accurate than those for a day or a few days or a week ahead of time.  After about five days, trying to get too specific a forecast is a bit of a waste of effort, and it may always be.  One cannot, with finite computing power, calculate things to infinite precision, and without infinite precision, in the long term, Chaos makes one’s predictions ever more inaccurate.

Of course, that raises (not “begs”!) the question of whether reality is actually defined in any meaningful sense down to the level where limitless precision would apply.  In other words, are Real Numbers actually a thing that exists in reality?  That may seem a strange question, given that they are called “Real Numbers”, but that’s just a name, given by humans as a file heading if you will, a way to index the subject.  It doesn’t actually signify the reality of the real numbers, any more than those who call themselves “Conservative” in the current US are in any legitimate sense conservative by most agreed upon uses of that word.

Of course, all non-complex numbers are Real numbers, and all Real numbers can be considered complex numbers (just with a zero i component if they are only Real).  The counting numbers are still Real numbers, as are all the integers and fractions, and of course, all our best known “irrational”* numbers, like π and e.  But the vast majority of Real numbers cannot be specified by any reductive formula or algorithm, but have do be described digit by digit, forever—maximum information-type entropy.

So, to describe fully a “typical” specific Real number usually requires infinite information, with infinite precision.  But there’s a real (haha) question whether any portion of reality is defined so precisely, or whether that could even have any meaning.  As far as we currently know, the smallest distance that has physical meaning is the Planck Length (about 1.6×10−35 m), and the shortest time that makes physical sense is the Planck Time (about 5.4×10−44 s), and so on.  These are very tiny numbers, but they are finite, not infinitesimal, and are certainly not infinitely non-repeating decimals.

But does the Planck Length (and Time) apply to actual, bottom-level reality, or is that merely a limit within the constraints of our current understanding?  We don’t know, for instance, how such things apply to gravity when it becomes strong enough for such scales to apply.

It’s mind-boggling, or at least wildly stimulating of probably inexpressible thought, that reality may be only finitely defined at every given point in space (which “points” themselves would only be finitely packed, so to speak, such that below a certain scale, the distance between two points would have no meaning) or that it may in fact be infinitely defined, down to the fully expressed Real Number level, and that indeed it may be infinitely divisible in the same sense Real Numbers are—and thus there would be, between any two points in spacetime, as many points as there are in ALL of spacetime.

Either possibility is wildly cool and difficult to represent internally—indeed, impossible to represent perfectly internally, but difficult even to contemplate roughly at any very deep level.  Is it any wonder that people like Cantor and Gödel were mentally ill, given the kinds of things they contemplated and explored?  I’m not saying those things were the reason for their illness; that would be a cheesy sort of magical thinking, redolent of an H. P. Lovecraft story.  But the contemplation of infinities and complexity and chaos is both sobering and intoxicating at the same time.

What do you know, I drifted into less banal areas after all.  I guess that’s a decent way to end the work week of blog posts.  I hope you all have an interesting and good weekend, without too many utterly unpredictable events (unless they’re good ones for you).

*Just to remind you, this does not refer to numbers that are in some sense crazy, just that they cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers, no matter how large the integers.  That’s the original meaning of the word irrational, but the very fact that there existed such numbers seemed so horrifying to the old Pythagoreans—or so I’ve heard—that it almost immediately acquired it’s secondary, now more common, usage.

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You flocks, you shoals, you fine emergent things

Well, it’s Tuesday morning, and I’m feeling a bit beat up and wrung out from yesterday, which was an extremely bad day, pain wise.  I really felt quite stiff and sore all day, and I couldn’t help walking with a limp.  It’s quite frustrating.  I do have potential assistance of a kind coming today, and hopefully that might make a difference.  We shall see.  I’ll tell you more when I have more information.

As for anything else, well, there’s really nothing else going on in my life.  I still haven’t done any work on new song lyrics, nor have I played the guitar or keyboard at all, nor sang.  I don’t even know what kind of shape my voice might be in at this point, but it’s probably pretty rough.

I think maybe I should drink more coffee during the day.  I used to drink it regularly when I was up north, but I’ve fallen off a lot since coming to Florida.  A big part of that is just that coffee is a hot drink, and hot drinks in Florida can be quite unpleasant.

But also, if I can reevaluate my own internal workings and decision-making memory‒which I can‒I tried to cut back on caffeine because I feared it was a major contributor to my tension and hostility and anxiety.  Well, you’ve read my blogs before (unless this is your first time), so it should be fairly clear that that particular intervention was not fit for purpose.  And one thing coffee has always done for me has been to be something to put in my mouth and stomach other than food.  That’s certainly worth a lot in my case.

Anyway, in the new office we have two refrigerators‒the boss brought in one from his garage that was not being used much‒and though neither has an ice maker, ice trays are easy.  So I can make iced coffee to take the sting off coffee’s hot nature.  I can’t directly take the sting off Florida’s hot and muggy nature, of course, but it’s bearable most of the time.

And in the long run, who knows how Florida’s specific climate will alter as the world’s overall surface temperature increases?  One might assume it will just get hotter and more humid*, but it’s best not to jump to conclusions.  Weather patterns are the archetypal chaotic system, and though climate and weather are not synonyms, there is a relation.

Many things interact to maintain specific local climates.  For instance, the Gulf Stream keeps the British Isles much warmer than they would be otherwise, being so far north, but it is not a fixed pattern in the Atlantic, but a product of confluences of various forces and feedback loops (as well as probably feed-sideways paths).  It has not existed forever.  It just feels like it has because human lives are so short, and human minds tend to be woefully parochial and provincial.  This is a source of so many human problems, not least the failure to learn obvious lessons from history.

But I guess there’s not much point in moaning about that lamentable fact right now.  I try to do my little part by writing about what I think are occasionally interesting and thought-provoking ideas, and by trying to learn about all sorts of things myself, from history and philosophy to biology and physics and mathematics‒and, of course, I’m technically an expert on medicine.  It’s as if I hope that by increasing my own knowledge about as many things as I can, I’ll be able to bring up the average and perhaps have some magical diffusion effect.

I don’t actually think that, of course, nor is that really my motivation for learning about various things and stuff.  I just like to understand and know things, to the degree possible, and I enjoy the process of learning them.  Physics is the most interesting subject to me in many ways because it is the study of the workings out of physical reality.  Everything else that happens is “simply” chaotic, emergent murmurations that happen on the surface of the underlying processes.

There is a question whether mathematics is even more fundamental than physics or is rather an invention of humans to describe and work with the patterns that are happening that are not guided by mathematics, perhaps, but simply produce it as an epiphenomenon.

I think Stephen Wolfram proposed something along those lines, based on “cellular automata”**, but though I have his book A New Kind of Science, I have not read it, because I have the Kindle edition.  It’s not really formatted for Kindle, so it’s basically just a PDF of the original book, and that can make it very difficult to read on one’s smartphone.

Such thoughts are quite entertaining and they can sometimes be productive.  I often wish more people were interested in them rather than, for instance, what some particular celebrity did to some other celebrity, or whether some particular advertisement can, with tortured logic, be “judged” to be inherently offensive and even evil, or just how horrifically to punish someone who agrees with only 99% of the things you believe, but disagrees on 1%.

Okay, I need to avoid getting started on that train of thought.  So, I’ll draw today’s post to a close.  Hopefully, by tomorrow I will have some relatively better news than I’ve had recently.  If so, I will probably share it with you.  In the meantime, try your best to have a good day.

*Particularly if sea level rises enough for a lot of the state to become submarine‒now that would be high humidity.

**The most well-known case probably being John Conway’s Game of Life, which is a “game” on a 2-dimensional grid of squares, with particular, simple rules about what happens to any given square depending on whether its neighbors are empty or not.  Remarkable, self-sustaining, and even traveling patterns form from these basic notions, similar to the way the flocking*** behavior of birds can be described with a few basic rules followed by each bird individually, requiring no communications other than just seeing where one’s nearest neighborings are.

***That sound like an epithet, does it not?