Nature

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Compassion is true justice, isn’t it?

It’s Friday, and I’m writing what should be my last blog post of the week, since I don’t think I’m going to work tomorrow—we’ve been having a good week, all things considered, though it doesn’t have a great deal of impact on me other than making it more likely for me to have Saturday off.

I guess I’m grateful for that.  After all, I really do seem to need frequent time to decompress by just lolling about and doing nothing.  Considering that, throughout my life, I’ve almost never given myself any time to rest beyond that which is absolutely necessary, I guess it’s not too surprising that I’ve worn myself out.

I feel a vague, general hostility this morning, bordering on unfocused hatred—not towards any specific or particular thing but toward everything in general.  It’s a bit of a shame.  It’s not really new for me, though.  I remember, well into my past, realizing that I didn’t like “people” overall, but that I had a hard time specifically hating people I knew, or at least the people I knew fairly well.

That’s a curious fact.  I could recognize that, at first glance, I found humans as a whole frustrating, often disgusting, frequently reprehensible, and in general just rather pathetic—but then, when I got to know someone, I usually found them at least tolerable, and usually in some ways likable.  It’s probably because, when you get to know a person, and you see the various aspects of their lives and their personalities, you realize that even their negative attributes are clearly not of their choosing, and you develop at least a sense of compassion for them, even if there is no actual affection.

I guess, in a way, it’s a realization that humans are not much more responsible for their character than, say, a dog is, though they delude themselves otherwise.  And although there are dogs that are unpleasant, with bad habits and so on, people mostly recognize that dogs are not the authors of their negative attributes (nor of their positive ones).

Humans in general have more agency than dogs, but not nearly as much as they think they have.  No one chooses their ancestry, of course, and so they do not choose their genes, nor the location and circumstances of their birth, nor the culture in which they live, nor the things they are taught—true and false and nonspecific.  It’s probably unnecessarily biasing to think of everyone as “victims”, since not all the things that happen to us (or within us) are negative.  But certainly, people are passengers in life rather than drivers.

Yes, even those who have great wealth and power are no more the authors of the world than are the most abjectly impoverished.  They are luckier, of course; it would be churlish and foolish to think otherwise.  But they are not really any more “in charge” than anyone else is.

They don’t like to admit it, but that’s probably because they are terrified of recognizing their own powerlessness, which is understandable.  But there is little to no doubt about the fact that they are just the same type of flotsam and jetsam as everyone else.  Even the vastly wealthy and successful (and reasonably smart) Steve Jobs fell victim not just to pancreatic cancer but to his own irrational biases in eschewing scientifically supported treatment for it.

This is not to imply that, had he been treated, he would definitely have survived.  Pancreatic cancer is no joke.  The pancreas has no tissue capsule around it, and it is not surrounded by firm structures that would lead to early pain and thus early diagnosis of the illness, so by the time most people know they have the disease, it is often very advanced and has spread quite far.

Jobs’s outcome might have been no better had he engaged the best, top-level, scientifically validated treatment available (which he certainly could have afforded).  His chances would just have been better.

Sooner or later he would have died anyway, just like everyone else.  Death is not optional, not even for the universe itself, as far as we can tell.  This is not to say that spacetime may not endure forever in some form or another—it quite possibly shall—but what we consider to be our universe, a place in which complexity and life itself can exist, even if only in a tiny, tiny, miniscule fraction of the cosmos, is inescapably working toward increasing entropy.  And while a Poincaré recurrence may also wait in the distant future (the mathematics suggests that it does), that’s not likely to be much consolation to anyone here and now.

No, in the scope of time even more so than in the expanse of space*, the place for any kind of life appears tiny indeed.  People say silly things like “our universe is fine-tuned for life”, but that’s absurd on its face.  Almost every location in the cosmos is incapable of supporting life as we know it, at least without significant modification**.

People are biased because they live in places where life is possible—but that’s tautological, when you think about it.  And even here, on the surface of the Earth, in a civilization that spontaneously self-assembled to house humans and their subordinate animals, most people could not survive without the technology and services provided by (and invented by) other humans.

So, perhaps compassion is the most reasonable attitude to have toward people, even when they are at their worst.  That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try to stop people from doing bad things and hurting each other and themselves.  But thinking of them as evil is probably not merely counterproductive but actually unjust.  Evil is an adjective that can apply to deeds, but I think it’s never a very good description of individuals in real life.

That’s me being relatively positive and gentle, isn’t it?  I know, it’s disgusting.  I’ll try to avoid it in the future.  In the meantime, please try to have a good day and a good weekend, and repeat after that for as long as you can.

*If time and space are both infinite in extent, as they may be, it’s difficult to compare fractions of them to say which might, in some fashion, be a bigger proportion.  Is a googol (10100) a bigger percentage of infinity than 1 is?  Not mathematically.  Any finite number one can choose, no matter how large, is unreasonably close to zero when compared to infinity.  And that’s just the smallest version of infinity, ℵ0.  Don’t even try to start considering fractions of, say, the real numbers.  You can’t even begin to count them, because you cannot, even in principle, find a smallest one with which to begin, or the next one from any starting point.  There are an uncountably infinite number of real numbers between any two specific numbers you might pick, no matter how close together they are.

**I did a YouTube video related to this, that I titled There is NO life in the universe.  I don’t remember how good my points were, but if you’re interested, here it is.  Actually, even if you’re not interested, here it is.

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Mind your vectors and terms of address

I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer again, because even though I find the extra weight of carrying it mildly annoying at the end of the day, at least sometimes the irritation of trying to write using my stupid smartphone is worse.

Although, since those two versions of me exist at different times, it’s hard to weigh their degrees of perceived irritation against each other.  In the morning, if I’m using my thumbs to try to type on a diminutive screen in a fashion that could be easily predicted to lead to some manner of repetitive stress injury, its all too natural for the “me” of that moment to hate the “me” of the previous evening who elected not to bring the laptop computer back with him.

But the “me” of the evening, when faced with the minor extra effort of the mini laptop, can feel very much overwhelmed and exhausted and think that the “me” of the following morning won’t find the process of writing using the smartphone particularly difficult.

The human consciousness clearly doesn’t have one, singular, constant terminal drive or goal as an imagined artificial general intelligence might.  I suppose one might think that the drive “to stay alive” would count as an ironically designated terminal goal, but that’s clearly not an accurate interpretation of the situation.

Not only are some people quite self-destructive and even actively suicidal—which you might credibly dismiss as dysfunction, not the lack of a dedicated system, though I think that would be imprecise—but there’s no good way to think that such a specific drive could evolve.  Evolution is blind to “death” as a concept or force, except as a failure, an accident, a lack, whatever you want to call it.

Before humans, as far as we can tell, no creature on Earth had a concept of “death” as the cessation of the biological processes of an individual organism.  Instead, there are proxies, such as the drive to avoid pain, and the related strong sensation of fear relating to danger and so on.

Similarly, there is no drive “to reproduce” in human (or other animal) minds.  Teens going through puberty don’t start feeling the literal desire to replicate their DNA in other bodies.  Instead, proxies for reproduction evolved, urges and drives that tended to lead to increased chances of reproduction, such as dominance hierarchy drives and displays in social primates such as humans, sexual attraction, and—of course—the pleasure of sex itself, with the reward-based drive to have it as often as feasible (with other inputs adjusting the strength of that drive and causing it to manifest differently in the two biological sexes and at different times and places).

The human brain—like probably all the other adequately complex brains on Earth—is a mélange of modules, with varying drives and processes that have evolved in parallel and sometimes independently, and also developed ways of interacting with each other.  Of course, at the root are the automatic drives that are all but undeniable—the respiratory drive, the thermoregulation drive, and so on.

There are even drives that are neurological in a broad sense, but that are so fundamental that they cannot be interdicted by the rest of the nervous system, only adjusted—I’m thinking here mainly of the heartbeat, the driver of which is in the sino-atrial* node and the Purkinje system of the heart, which is sort of a cross between muscle and nerve tissue.

The upshot is, if you ever feel that you’re “of two minds” on some particular subject, you’re probably not just speaking metaphorically, whether you know it or not.  Your final actions are produced by what I see as the final vector sum (and it can be quite small in the end or it can be huge in magnitude and surprising in direction) of all the drives or “pressures” in the brain that have any effect on decisions about behavior.  Then the action caused by the final behavior feeds back on the system**, changing the lengths and directions of some (perhaps sometimes all) of the contributing vectors, causing changes in the inputs and thus changes in the final vector sum of behavior.  Lather, rinse, repeat as needed, ad nauseam if not actually ad infinitum.

Please don’t imagine this as the sum of physical vectors in real spacetime.  The number of possible dimensions of such mental/neurological vectors is huge.  For all I know, there might even be spinors and tensors and matrices involved, but I don’t think those are necessary for my vague model.  “Simple” higher dimensional vectors probably do the trick.

What a curious set of things about which to write that was!  I had originally intended to start this post with some version of The Simpsons’ “Hi, everybody!”  “Hi, Dr. Nick!” exchanges, perhaps then noting that I could change “Dr. Nick” to “Dr. Robert” and thus reference both The Simpsons and the Beatles at the same time.

But then I might have noted that, although the Beatles song is so titled, “Dr. Robert” is not the way anyone has ever referred to me in actual practice.  It would be, honestly, a little weird for someone to refer to their physician as, for instance, “Dr. Joe” or “Dr. Judy” or whatever, certainly in our culture.

Mind you, there was that tendency for a while (it may still be prevalent) to have kids speak to adults such as teachers and daycare workers and people of that sort using their “title” and then their “given name”, such as “Miss Barbara” or “Mister Jimmy”.  I have always thought that was weird.  I mean, just imagine someone trying to address a certain prominent fictional character as “Dr. Hannibal”.

Alas, that all ended up being a discussion not worth having, except as an afterthought.  Though it’s debatable whether any discussion at all is actually worth having—including the discussion about whether any discussion is worth having.

You all can discuss that if you want; feel free to use the comments below, and to share this post to your social media platforms or what have you.  When you do discuss it, remember to define your terms ahead of time, and stick to them rigorously—i.e., the meaning of “discussion”, and of “worth”, and so on—so that you decrease your chances of getting involved in semantic games and misunderstandings and sophistry.

Whatever you choose to do, please try to have a good day.

*The “sino* in that term relates to its location in what’s called the sinus of the heart, and the “i” in it is a long “i”; it has nothing to do with China, though an identical prefix is sometimes used to mean “related to China”, but in this case with a sort of short “i” sound…or, really, a long “e” sound.

**And there are surely numerous other feedback loops all along the way affecting many, or perhaps all, of the vectors.

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The stochasticity of quantum interactions and the names of days of the week

It’s Wednesday today.  That’s a weird way to spell a day, and a weird way to spell a version of the name of the god Wotan or Odin, after whom the day is named (unless I am quite, quite mistaken).

Our days are peculiarly and seemingly haphazardly named here in the English-speaking West.  We’re not the only ones with inconsistent weekday names, but ours are certainly a strange hodgepodge.  Sunday and Monday are relatively straightforward:  they’re named for the sun and the moon.  Then, weirdly, we suddenly switch to Norse (!) mythology and name the next four days after four of the old Scandinavian deities.  Then, abruptly, we switch to a Roman god, Saturn, for Saturday.

This “names of the days of the week” thing was clearly not planned out.  It just sort of happened.  But that’s the way so many things occur in the real world—indeed, perhaps everything just sort of happens, and at multiple levels—not randomly but nevertheless stochastically and in a way that is functionally unpredictable, at least in its details.

The various quantum fields just sort of interact in ways that, at their lowest stable energy levels, give us quarks and gluons and electrons and photons and W and Z bosons and various neutrinos and a nonzero Higgs field that interacts with some (but not all) of the other fields.  The quarks and gluons just happen to form up stably into protons (and some neutrons, but neutrons are only stable within an atomic nucleus—they decay with a half-life of about ten minutes when existing freely).  And the protons happen to interact, via the electromagnetic field, with the electron field, and they stably pair up, and neutrons come into play “afterwards”, stabilizing larger atomic nuclei (though that’s not all they do).

Then, on large scales, the graviton field (if there indeed is such a thing, which is suspected but not certain) interacts with all the other fields, and where the density of stuff is slightly higher it pulls that stuff in towards itself, and where it is less, that rarefied stuff gets thinned out further as its components are pulled by neighboring stronger areas of gravity.

This process undergoes positive feedback—as stuff gets denser, its gravity gets more prominent, and that in turn tends to make the stuff get denser still.  And if there is any net angular momentum to larger collections of the stuff—and there almost always is some net angular momentum, since there’s only one way to have zero angular momentum, and there is a functionally limitless number of ways for it to be nonzero*—the stuff starts to rotate around a net common axis.

And then, of course, we get galaxies, and in those galaxies, we get stars, in which the interactions of the various quantum fields and gravity lead the protons and neutrons to get together into bigger clumps, some of which are quite stable (and the ones that aren’t stable simply don’t endure but transform into other states until they find ones that are stable).

Then stars run out of fuel, and the various field interactions and gravity produce various kinds of spectacular deaths, most of which involve scattering at least some heavier elements** out into the reaches of the galaxies.  Then we get next generations of stars, which (by the way) clump and develop angular momentum in a smaller but similar way to the galaxies.  And now, with heavier elements, we get planets, some of which are largely solid.

I think you know the broad strokes of the rest of the story.  If not, let me know.

Of course, this is a very general sketch of how stuff just came together to form the universe in which we exist, and there’s no indication that that is anything more than just small things—or esoteric things, really, such as quantum fields and their local perturbations—interacting with each other and making patterns on larger scales, much as water molecules can clump into fantastic patterns in the frost on windows or in snowflakes when they get cool enough.  Simple (well, relatively simple) rules at small scales can come together to produce surprising things at larger scales when they all interact at secondary, tertiary, quaternary and higher levels.

If you want to see how remarkable that tendency can be even in two dimensions, find a website that lets you play “John Conway’s Game of Life” and see how stable and active and interactive shapes can arise from even truly simple rules.

What was my point?  Sorry, I got distracted there for a minute.  Oh, right, I just meant to say that the things that happen and that all seem very real and important and even inevitable and fundamental are largely the products of stochastic processes interacting in ways that ultimately are far from being representable by any kind of linear equation.

It’s entirely possible and plausible that, if the rules of the quantum fields—or the specific types of quantum fields*** involved—were different, and thus interacted with each other differently, they might still accumulate into structures and functions on higher levels, and though they might produce a universe that would be all but incomprehensible to us, and in which we could not survive for an instant, they might nevertheless form structures and processes that could become what would have to be called “alive” and even “aware” and “intelligent”.

But in how many such universes would there be creatures that name the days of whatever passes for their weeks after various astronomical bodies (or whatever they have that is comparable) and random mythological figures from different places and times?

I leave it to the reader to speculate.

*There’s only so fast anything can be spinning, since no part of the spinning thing can exceed the speed of light.  Even black holes have a maximum angular velocity.  Nevertheless, both the angular velocity and the net axis of rotation can be more or less continuously variable.  If we can apply the real numbers—which ironically may not be possible in the real world—there is an uncountably infinite number of possible ways for angular momentum to be nonzero.  That makes zero really unlikely and unstable.

**Astronomers call any element but Hydrogen and Helium a “metal”, which is a very loose use of the term if you ask me.  I think many astronomers would agree, and sometimes I think I detect more than a tiny amount of embarrassment when they tell people that astronomical definition.

***Or the configurations of strings and branes if superstring/M theory turns out to be correct.

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That small model of the barren earth which serves as paste and cover to our blogs

Hello and good morning.

Well, I forgot to bring my mini laptop computer back to the house with me last night, so I am writing this post on my smartphone.  At least that should tend to keep the post brief, I guess.

It feels a bit weird not to be discussing my kidney stone, doesn’t it?  Oh, wait, I guess I just brought it up, so to speak, didn’t I?  Although, you don’t want to bring up a kidney stone in any literal way, of course.  But it does seem that mine must have passed, since the symptoms are almost completely resolved.  It feels weird, in a way, to be able to go a long time between trips to the restroom!

There’s still pretty much nothing else going on in my personal news.  No creative endeavors are underway at all.  I thought about asking my boss if he could bring my black Strat back, but I haven’t felt much other than chagrin at the thought.  I imagine it sitting idle by my desk, mocking me with my apparent inability to do anything at all engaging or creative.

I don’t know what to do with what’s left of my life, if anything.  Why would I try to achieve anything of consequence when humans are, overall, so stupidly unable to recognize almost anything sensible about the world and their place in it, such as it is?  They are so small and provincial and tribal‒though perhaps it’s hypocritical of me to characterize them as such when I am expressing general misanthrope toward them, which is a sort of tribalism/xenophobia/prejudice in and of itself.

Still, I wouldn’t say that all human beings are any one thing other than human beings, and that’s just a tautology.  I don’t like to generalize about 8+ billion beings, except in the obvious, trivial ways.  Though humans are, overall, far more alike than they are unalike, there is nevertheless tremendous variation in their specifics*.  No two humans who have ever lived have been exactly the same; even identical twins have different development and local environments that make them diverge, at first subtly, but with growing potential difference, rather like the progression of a chaotic system.

Two first-degree relatives can diverge more, of course, or at least they are more prone to do so.  And two “unrelated”** humans can diverge still more.  Nevertheless, the phase space through which their trajectories may wander, while functionally limitless in certain dimensions, is nevertheless a tiny sliver of the phase space of all mammals, or of all vertebrates, or of all animals, or of all eukaryotes, or of all terrestrial life.  And we don’t even know what other possibilities may be available.

I guess my overall point is that I do not feel like a part of this species, or even of this biosphere.  I feel other.  I do not feel a sense of connection to the people or creatures around me, not in any deep and persistent way.  Maybe I used to feel that; I can’t recall right now.  Maybe I’ve just degenerated over time.

Oh, well.  I guess for the moment I will go through the motions as I have been and try to see if it gets easier.  I don’t expect it will, but I guess it’s technically possible.

TTFN

*Not in the biological sense of the word, though that ends up being a nice coincidence.

**I put the “scare” quotes around the word because of course all humans are related, and not in some absurd, Adam and Eve mythological way.  Indeed, all life on Earth is related‒yes, even octopuses.  It’s very unlikely that a life form that didn’t arise on Earth would be able to digest any form of sustenance here, because biological material, and the enzymes that break it down, are highly specific in their characteristics and interactions***.

***That’s why I currently inhabit this cumbersome, irritating body, despite all its failings****.

****I don’t really think that I’m an extraterrestrial consciousness trapped in a human body, of course.  That’s just a metaphorical way to express how I feel*****.

*****Or is it?

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The paragraph indentations below are not merely done on a whim

     Wow, okay, yesterday was one heckuva day, and not in a good sense for the most part; it was a real cluster-fudge*, so to speak.  This is not meant to imply that yesterday was all bad or anything; that would be absurd.  I may be a madman (without a box, alas), but I am not so irrational as to think that there were no positive things in any given twenty-four hour period, even if I restrict the universe being evaluated down to only things that happen to me.

     I have never been one of those depressed people who interprets himself or his life as “all bad”.  That would make things easier, probably‒I would either have destroyed myself long ago or I would have embraced my identity as a pure villain**.  But I am capable of nuance, an attribute that seems often to be missing in our political discourse.

     Mind you, that latter happens largely because it’s what people seem to want to consume, or at least what enough people want, and to which enough people respond, that it becomes a stable and often successful strategy for politicians to use.  So, at least some of the “blame” for the vacuity of news and politics is that humans tend to run toward misleading simplicities rather than dealing with a complex world in which even people with whom they disagree can have good points and do good things and have their own pain and loss and fear and love and memory and dreams.  And even people with whom they agree on most things can nevertheless sometimes behave like complete assholes.

     The world is complicated.  How could it not be?  Almost everything of which we are aware and of which our reality consists is constructed from incomprehensibly vast numbers of interactions between quantum fields on tiny, tiny scales, with causality propagating at the speed of light, with behaviors and properties requiring complex numbers*** to describe mathematically.  If you’re an electrical engineer, you might use complex numbers in real life, because they are very useful for modeling cyclical processes like alternating current, but most macroscopic, emergent processes don’t require complex numbers to describe.

     Or maybe they would be best described, mathematically at least, using complex numbers, but most macroscopic, emergent phenomena have too many things going on‒too many moving parts, if you will‒to be efficiently described by any remotely practical mathematical formalism.  Even computer algorithms might be inadequate to describe the functioning of large scale matters in sufficient detail.

     It may be that natural language really is the best tool for describing such aspects of reality, since it allows one to vary one’s level of intricacy and complexity to suit the needs of any given situation.  But of course, to do so requires one to be rigorous to the point of being a martinet about one’s language usage.  If a word or term can have more than one meaning, it is crucial to specify which meaning one intends so as to avoid apparent disagreements that actually just come down to semantic confusion.

     I don’t necessarily mind semantic discussions‒I like words and language and logic and poetry and puns and all that stuff‒but if one is trying to share an explanation for something, and really to share understanding, precise word meaning is going to be necessary.  You can’t use html to write a program that runs in Pascal.  Okay that’s not a great analogy.  Let’s say…you can’t win a game of Texas hold ’em poker by following the strategy you would use for euchre.  It’s not just that you won’t win; your moves won’t even make sense.

     Okay, well, that’s probably enough for today.  I’ve been trying not to be as negative as I was yesterday, and I think I’ve succeeded reasonably well.  I do this sort of back and forth thing so often that some people have said they wonder if I am literally bipolar with a rapid cycling rate.  I can only respond by saying that this possibility has been considered by me and by several different mental health professionals, and it is thought not to be the case.  Of course, I’ve never been tried on a course of, say, lithium****, nor really on any of the other, less tricky mood stabilizers (other than as would-be adjuncts for chronic pain treatment).  But if I were occasionally waxing manic, I would imagine that sometimes I would feel really good about myself, and I rarely do.  Also, antidepressants have never triggered a manic or hypomanic event for me, and I’ve taken many different ones at different times.

     All right, well, there was a whole paragraph after I’d already said I’d written enough.  My apologies.  I do go on, don’t I?  Have a good day, if you can.

*If no one has used that euphemism as the name of a brand of candy, I’ll be even more disappointed in humanity than I was already.

**Knowing me, I would probably accidentally do good for the world every time I tried to do evil.  At least it would be funny.

***Complex numbers are numbers with one “real” part, i.e., some number on the usual, continuous number line, and one “imaginary” part, which is a real number multiplied by i, the square root of -1, which is no more truly imaginary than is any other number.

****I like the song a lot, though.

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Eddies in the flow of reality (but that’s not his sofa)

It’s Monday, in case anyone didn’t realize it.  Actually, whether or not anyone out there realized the fact, it’s still Monday.  Not that nature recognizes anything “Mondayish” about this day; the divisions of the days into weeks and months is all just human convention*.  Years, on the other hand, are natural cycles, as are days.

You can probably tell that I have no interesting ideas about which to write today, so I’m trading in banalities.  I try to get interested in discussing economics and politics and all that stuff, but except in rare instances‒though I lament and bemoan the seemingly indelible stupidity of human “civilization”‒it’s mostly just obviously futile and pathetic.  The people seeking and gaining “power” seem fundamentally deluded about their own importance, as is nearly everyone else.  Yet, if the everyday person’s grasp of even recent history is any evidence, almost nothing is even going to be remembered even a few months into the future.

I don’t quite understand how people live in their world without even a sense of context beyond their immediate environs.  I suppose that’s the natural state of humans.  In prehistoric times it was probably more than adequate, and certainly there’s been little time for evolution to alter the fundamental workings of the human brain to make them more suitable for dealing with the realities of the very large, complex, spontaneously self-assembled system that they call civilization.

Or maybe neurodivergence is the evolution of the brain to adapt to such systems, and the only reason so-called normal humans even still exist is that there were a lot more of them in the beginning.  Sometimes I think that people with ASD and ADHD and so on should do a Magneto kind of movement and rise up, throwing off the yoke of humans.  After all, if modern resurgence of authoritarianism and xenophobia/rights violations even in the US demonstrates anything, it is that the notion of “never again” which refers to the ideal of ensuring that the holocaust (or something like it) never recurs, is a pipe dream.

And yet, to revile and try to overthrow so-called normal humans could perhaps be just such an expression of bigotry, or at least prejudice, as I am bemoaning.  Would that be hypocritical and/or unjust?  If so, could it still be a necessary evil?  Is there any such thing as “necessary evil” or is that always just a cop-out?  (I’m interested in readers’ thoughts on that last question.)

From a physics point of view, humanity itself is not necessary, and there seems to be a pretty good likelihood that humanity is not even consequential, but that the whole of civilization is just a transient, highly local phenomenon, that will flash out of existence leaving no more remnants behind than do the little whorls and eddies of beautiful shapes that happen with you first pour cream into coffee.

In the long run, as far as we can see, the universe will be not just dead but mostly empty.  And though there are theoretical bases for everything starting over again (e.g., a Poincaré Recurrence) almost all of the intervening time‒which is so vast compared to the piddling age of the universe so far as to make 13 billion years like a single flap of a bee’s wing in the history of life on Earth‒will be lifeless.  So, looking at what appears to be nearly irrefutable physics, lifelessness is the natural, usual state of reality.

Of course, in principle, people could get beyond that, as David Deutsch has pointed out in The Beginning of Infinity.  Of course, as he has also pointed out, there is nothing that guarantees that people will become cosmically significant; it’s entirely possible for civilization to stagnate and decay or to self-destruct.

There is, mind you, plenty of time left in the lifespan of “habitability” of the Earth, so there might be time for another species to develop a civilization if humans die out, but there’s no good reason to suspect that they would be any more prepared to develop a cosmically significant culture than humans have been.

Maybe what we should do is split the human race into neurotypical and neurodivergent populations sort of like the Vulcans and Romulans in Star Trek.  Obviously (I think) the neurodivergent people would  be the Vulcans and the “typical” humans would be the Romulans‒you know, warlike, cruel, spiteful, duplicitous, and without honor.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make this morning.  Maybe the point is that there is no point, that all meaning is internal and provincial and ultimately solipsistic or at least narcissistic.  But I am not enthusiastic about any of it, really.  I’m tired already, and it’s only Monday morning.

Oh, well.  Welcome to the new week.  I hope you all are doing well and feeling well as well.

*Which sounds a bit like some weird fan expo by aliens pretending to be and/or celebrating humanity.

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I do wish thou wert a dog, that I might blog thee something.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing another blog post.

I did an update yesterday to my little miniature laptop, and now the MS Word (and presumably Office overall) has also been updated, with—as usual—relatively frustrating consequences.

Microsoft appears to have a real knack for changing things that were perfectly fine and making them not as good as they used to be, adding things that no intelligent person wants—like their frequent, irritating interruptions asking us if we want to let their AI assist us.

And, of course, they still have their stupid Craptos font in place as the baseline, even though it looks terrible and not at all professional.  Honestly, I’d rather submit a scientific paper in Comic Sans than in that stupid new Aptos, largely because they haven’t given us a choice whether or not to have that as our primary font.

They also have that stupid office icon everywhere that looks sort of like a ribbon folded over four times, or whatever that stupid symbol is supposed to seem to be.  It’s distracting and intrusive.  Why do they change things just for the sake of changing something?  It’s just stupid.

This is one of the big failings of some among the “progressive” end of the political spectrum.  They rant on and on about wanting to make “change”.  But change, in and of itself, is not necessarily a good thing.  I’ve gone over this so many times, but random change is much more likely to be detrimental than beneficial, especially in a system that is functioning relatively well.

Most mutations in germline cells don’t lead to improved survival and reproduction.  Only the rare few that happen to confer some local advantage will make an organism more robust.  That’s natural selection, and it is inherently blind and stupid.  It only produces “progress” because it has unthinkably long time-scales and numbers of organisms with which to work, and is utterly blind to suffering and failure and, yes, even to extinction.

When engineered systems are changed, those changes need to be evaluated, carefully thought through, and ideally tested thoroughly before being put into full implementation.  Otherwise, matters can degenerate rather than be enhanced.

Random mutations almost never produce benefit; even a complex, reasonably stable system is going to suffer if there are arbitrary changes.  Most systems in reality are not streamlined, smoothly functioning, sleek and simple designs.  They are Rube Goldberg machines, and if one bit of random “machinery” goes off, almost always the whole thing will fail completely.

In the body, random genetic changes are likely to lead to cell death or, even worse, to the development of cancer.  Similarly, radical changes in products or governments are almost always catastrophic.  This is one of the reasons even Jefferson noted, in the Declaration of Independence, that prudence recommends that, while imperfections in a current government are tolerable, it’s usually better not to go the way of revolution but to endure, changing the system gradually from within.

Only when there is no other way to do things that does not entail worse suffering should one overthrow or radically change the government.

Of course, for government changes to be overall beneficial, it’s important for the people involved to be knowledgeable and thoughtful, careful, committed to making things as good as possible and willing to correct their own errors (which requires them to admit to being fallible).  This is part of why the current and recent governments, in the USA at least, have been horrible.  They are run by micro-brained monkeys throwing their feces at each other, too stupid to realize that they are ignorant, and too narcissistic (on both sides) to be self-correcting.

Even the people at Microsoft, which is a premier technology company and has made real advances and improvements in its day, seem prone to this moronic “change for the sake of change” thing.

I hate them.  I hate all of them.  I hate everything.  It’s all so, so, so irritating.  People are so stupid they think that they—or some people—run the world, which is utter nonsense.  They seem to imagine that the people and places that exist now are real, while the countless dead people in the past are not.  But we are the same as our dead forebears.  We are all just individual molecules in a vast bath, or as Kansas so eloquently put it, “just a drop of water in an endless sea”.

The fact that all these little AI assistant things are being mindlessly added into products is an example of change that it not well-considered.  It’s just a desperate, hysterical attempt to compete again others who are doing the same stupid thing.  We don’t know yet what good, if any, will come of it, but outcomes will almost certainly be unforeseeable—even by AIs.

I don’t know if it’s possible for me to have any realistic hope at all for the future of civilization, whether human or artificial or some combination.  So far, AIs have only impressed me when they have carefully focused goals, like winning at Go or figuring out protein folding.

I’m angry and frustrated.  At times, I just want to destroy all life in the universe and all potential for future life.  It just so often seems that life is a thoroughly bad idea in and of itself.

But probably it will be more efficient if I just destroy me.  I’m sure most people would prefer that to other options.

In the meantime, try to have a good day if you can, enmeshed as you all are in the poisonous net of reality.

TTFN

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And I looked, and behold a pale cat

Well, I have some relatively good news, which is why I decided to write a post today instead of just leaving it:  Dorian, the light gray cat, has returned.  Well…he was back last night, at least, though this morning he was nowhere to be seen once again, which is itself somewhat unusual.

He was a bit scraggly, with some traces of dried blood around his fur on the side of his head and neck, but it didn’t look like it was his blood.  He actually looked lean and healthy, moving very much like the hard-ass stray cat that he is.

I’m guessing that he got into a pretty big fight at some point‒he seems prone to them‒and then hid away somewhere while he recovered his strength.  Then, that pale grey shadow took a new shape* and grew again.

I think stray cats, like defective and damaged people, don’t like to show any weakness to those around them.  Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they are unable to show their weakness, even though they may crave acceptance and support.  There are good, sound biological motivations for this in stray cats and other mammals; showing weakness or injury can invite further aggression from other cats and even encourage predators.

Of course, human males (or anthropoid creatures living among humans, such as I) are no exceptions to that tendency.

It’s also been said that, in many ways, people on the autism spectrum are like cats, at least in some ways, and I can see the point, though it is an oversimplification.  Still, it leads me to speculate that, sometime in the relatively deep past, perhaps two separate subspecies of humans (maybe the legendary Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons) existed, one being more naturally ultrasocial, the other more constrained but with other capacities that aided their survival.  We know that Neanderthals, for instance, had bigger brains than so-called modern humans, but the structure appears to have been slightly different.

Perhaps it’s the genes from such a separate subspecies that led to some people having ASD or other versions of “neurodivergence”.  To be clear, I don’t know that there’s any good evidence that this is the case.  I did encounter at least one study that looked for markers known to be associated with the autism spectrum and the DNA residua of Neanderthals present in people of European descent.  There seemed to be some correlation, but I didn’t think it was particularly impressive.  So there’s not a lot of data to support the hypothesis.

It would be nice‒in some ways‒to think of oneself as just a different kind of human, not as something alien.  But I think that’s probably a silly dream for me.  I do not belong here in any serious sense; I am an alien, a mutant, a replicant, a stranger.  And to humans, of course, a stranger is presumptively an enemy unless and until proven otherwise.

Anyway, Dorian was back last night, but gone again this morning.  We’ll see if he returns.  There are other cats who come around.  But, of course, there is no real affection from most of them.  They come to me opportunistically, because I put food out for them.  I am useful to them.  Similarly, I am often useful to humans in the world.  I have many skills and abilities, so I have frequently found that people like to have me around to help them get things done.  But eventually, the negatives of my presence outweigh the positives, and people go away (or send me away).

I don’t blame them.  I want to go away from myself, though I have never had any desire to be anyone else.  I would prefer oblivion.  Or maybe I would just prefer rest.

Speaking thereof, I slept almost four hours last night, and of course, I awakened and couldn’t go back to sleep in the wee hours of the night, and I am now at the office finishing this post.  I don’t look forward to the weekend‒there’s nothing good about it‒but at least I can collapse and try to recuperate.  I don’t know if I’ll write anything next week, or just leave everything be.

I feel perched on the borderland between life and death, and the Undiscovered Country beckons.  It must be really great there, because no one who goes ever comes back.

*To be honest, it’s pretty much exactly the same as the old shape.

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Maybe it’s signal. Maybe it’s noise. Maybe it’s Maybelline?

Well, it’s Tuesday, and I don’t know that I have anything of use or substance to say, or anything to say that isn’t mostly just noise.  Perhaps I’m just some peculiar source of radio static in the background of the universe.  Or perhaps…perhaps I’m just pretending that what I do is unplanned, when in fact everything is calculated and subversive.

Ha!  I wish.  My brain doesn’t work like that, and I’m not sure anyone else’s does, either.  Even John Von Neumann had to develop complex mathematics and sophisticated models to deal with the limited degree of uncertainty in highly simplified versions of one-on-one poker.  If he was so intrigued by what he‒possessing perhaps the highest general intelligence of which history is firmly aware‒could not fully model, then this is strong evidence that no one, now or ever, has really been in control of anything.

Of course, game theory has advanced since Von Neumann co-invented it, and it is certainly useful, but it is clear that, at best, it deals in probabilities and tendencies.  There is no Asimovian 2nd Foundation Hari Seldon psychohistory that can figure out the specific events of whole galactic civilizations well into the future, and I doubt there ever will be.

Of course, if we want to be trivial, we can predict the far future with some degree of confidence:  Eventually, unless our knowledge of the universe is deeply mistaken*, as entropy increases inexorably, new stars will stop forming, old stars will burn out (even red dwarfs), black holes will evaporate, and the universe will be a thin haze of elementary particles.  Indeed, if everything eventually reduces to massless bosons (e.g., photons) then in a very real sense, time will literally have no meaning, since photons, being massless particles, do not “experience” time.  From their point of view‒to speak very figuratively‒their entire existence is instantaneous.

Of course, going on to the very far future, given the nature of probability, new universes may arise.  Something like Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology may be the way things happen, or there may merely be a Poincaré recurrence of the universe.  Or maybe, as I’ve speculated previously, time is not one way, and our future might also be the future of another, far distant “big bang” but for which time/entropy increases in the opposite direction.

Also, of course, if civilization and intelligence persists and grows, which is not a small “if”, then who knows where technology will develop?  Our descendants could conceivably develop the capacity to do cosmic engineering, literally shaping the large-scale development of the universe, or even making new ones.

But I suspect they still will not be able to micromanage perfectly the interactions of innumerable agents in complex systems.  Some limits are fundamental, and I think this may be one.  This comes down to something related to my “Elessar’s First Conjecture/Theorem”, that no complex, intelligence can ever fully understand itself in detail, because to model a given complex system requires a system of greater complexity, which itself will need to be described, leading to an infinite regress.

And, of course, we know that in complex systems, in which interactions are stochastic and multivariate and nonlinear (and thus exhibit chaotic development) the specifics of future happenings will be unpredictable since to know them perfectly, we would need an infinite number of significant digits**, though in some cases‒like entropy‒we can make general predictions with high confidence.  

This is part of why “planned economies” fail, and almost certainly always will, unless they are stupendously lucky.  In any case, such luck will not last, just as neither strength nor good purpose will last in the presence of the One Ring.  This is also why most complex conspiracy theories are simply laughable.

People derive their models of the world to too great a degree from our ubiquitous visual entertainment, which has been around long enough to be deeply self-mimicking and self-derivative.  Gunshots and explosions don’t behave in real life the way they do in action movies, but action movies (and shows and videos) take their models of the world from previous action movies, much as an AI’s model of human speech and interaction, if derived from the internet, is going to be increasingly contaminated by the products of other AIs, and may end up veering far away from anything reminiscent of human interactions, at least if left to its own devices.

Maybe that’s an advantage of written fiction over movies and TV and other videos; it’s not presenting a simulation of some version of reality, it’s telling you a story, describing things, but you have to imagine them.  Meanwhile, if all your fiction is in words, your physical intuition of the real world‒and your psychological and sociological and economic intuition‒would be derived from real events, not the Machiavellian machinations of Manichean movie-based manipulators.

That was an interesting stream of consciousness, if I do say so myself (and I do).  Who could have predicted it?  Not I.  And I’m the one who wrote it.  Which goes to my point.

Please try to have a good day.

*This is always possible in principle, but for many aspects of cosmology, our credences can be justifiably high.

**I sometimes say that while knowledge can vary greatly, ignorance is always infinite.  This can be proven with a single, simple example:  the digits of pi.  There are an infinite number of them, and no matter how many we calculate, there will be an infinite number we don’t know.  Ditto for e and any other transcendental numbers, let alone all the other real numbers that have no specific designation, of which there exist an uncountable infinity.  And this is just one place where infinite information dwells, of which we will always have only finite knowledge.

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We skipped the light fandango…

Well, here I am, writing a blog post again on Tuesday, Batman* only knows why.  I don’t really have anything of substance to say.  Not that I had anything of substance to say yesterday.

Actually, come to think of it, I did encounter a neat fact last week.

One morning I decided to get in a bit of reading in one of the textbooks I keep in my office‒Classical Electrodynamics by John David Jackson.  I employed a technique I’ve often used for reviewing:  I flipped a coin to increasingly winnow down the textbook‒heads is first half, tails is second half, etc.‒and pick a random section to start reading.

I knew that much of the mathematical formalism and at least some of the technical matters in the book would be unfamiliar, so I didn’t expect to understand fully what I was reading.  But I also know that the stuff I do and don’t understand will linger in my brain, and as I’m exposed to other things that go with it or explain it or link up with it, the picture will form.  I don’t read or learn especially quickly, but I do learn deeply, and in a way that connects ideas and principles together in the end.

There was much of this brief section (which was about refraction and/or absorption of light** by water) that was slightly over my head.  Nevertheless, it was interesting, and the author introduced a graph (see below) showing at the top the refraction of light by water across wavelengths, and how it tends to vary.  I assume we’re all at least implicitly aware of the fact that different wavelengths are refracted by water differently‒thus the phenomenon of rainbows.

Below this is a table showing the absorption of electromagnetic radiation by water across frequencies.  Here there is a steep upward slope when coming in toward the center from highest and lowest frequencies.  It peaks at around the microwave/infrared wavelengths from the left and around the ultraviolet from the right.

Then a striking thing happens.  There is a sudden, precipitous drop in absorption down to very low levels in a fairly narrow range of frequencies in the “middle” of the graph, meaning that in this range, light passes through water with relatively little absorption.  This is the range we know as visible light.

The author took the time to point out that this fact about the nature of water‒that it is more or less transparent in this very narrow range of frequencies‒is exactly why we Earthlings tend to see only in that range.  It’s not an accident of evolution, some ancient, stochastic occurrence that is thenceforward cemented, unchangeable, into all descendants, like the DNA code and ribosomes and the chirality of biological molecules.  It is instead a fundamental fact of physics that determines where creatures will be able to see if they first developed vision while living in water and then developed eyes that, like the rest of them, were mainly made of water.

There’s no point in making retinal proteins that react to wavelengths of EM radiation that are almost entirely absorbed by water.

That simple fact‒simple in summary, at least‒is enough to explain a huge swath of the nature of our visual perception, and it doesn’t require any further explaining to understand why we see in the range of light we do.

That was just a randomly chosen section of a textbook that reputedly is extremely difficult.  I don’t disagree with that assessment of difficulty; it was a very dense bunch of material even in just 4 or 5 pages.  But to think that one can find such remarkable facts while just trying to read and learn in random order from a textbook!

So, that’s an interesting little tidbit that seems worth sharing, at least to me.  It’s far more interesting than anything going on in the human world right now.  What’s more, this is a fact that has existed as long as water itself has existed‒and implicitly, it existed even before that, lying there waiting in the fundamental laws of nature.  And it will be there long after everything but those fundamental laws is gone.

If you want to embrace eternity, and things like Hilbert’s Hotel and Cantor’s diagonal proof make you worry about your sanity (this happens to many of us, so don’t feel bad) then focus on this fact about visible light.  It’s there, it’s real, it’s quasi-eternal, and it’s concrete.

Though the absorption spectrum for concrete is…quite different.

*This harkens back to the reference from Batman Begins, when Flass says “I swear to God,” and Batman snarls “Swear to me!”  It seems fun to use Batman when one would normally say God.

**By “light” I mean all electromagnetic radiation, from radio waves to gamma rays.