Science

by

Mad morning musings and “The End of All That Is”

It’s Wednesday morning again, and here I am, reverting to habit, writing a blog post (this time on my smartphone) because I frankly can’t seem to think of anything better to do with my time.

Well…I could sleep.  That would be a better use of my time.  Except I can’t sleep.  Even on weekends, the only way I get myself to sleep through the night is to take two Benadryl™ before I lie down.  But that’s not really effective, restorative sleep, and though I stay in “bed” later, I can tell the next day that I’m not really rested.  Or maybe that’s just residual effects of the antihistamine, I don’t know.

The best thing about when I was taking Paxil for my depression‒which didn’t work overall, and gave me bad side-effects‒was that it made me not just able to go to sleep at night, but to actually feel good going to bed and going to sleep, to enjoy the process.  I had never experienced that before, nor have I since.  But, as I said, there were other side-effects that made it quite bad.

Also, it made me gain weight, which would be particularly bad now, because I’m already heavier than I’ve ever been.  That’s what can happen when one’s only reliable pleasure comes from eating, and when one also eats as a sort of “stimming” and soothing thing to try to ease a constant sense of anhedonia and stress and dysphoria.  And it’s not as though I could simply “embrace” my body size, because it comes with worsening pain and other unpleasant consequences.

Unfortunately, I don’t get immediate worsening of pain when I eat.  It’s delayed.  If it were immediate, I would probably develop a habitual avoidance, and that would be great.  I try to remind myself, when my ankles and knees and back and hips are hurting a lot, that this is caused, at least partly, by eating too much, but that auto-suggestion doesn’t seem quite to work.

I’m pretty sure that I would eat less if I slept better.  Chronic sleep loss tends to affect one’s regulatory and stress hormones, and can stimulate appetite (especially for carbohydrates) in many people.  I appear to be one of these people.

I wonder if I could figure out a way to cause myself pain while eating‒maybe I could put a clothespin on the end of my pinky when I eat, every time I eat.  I don’t know if you all remember, but having a clothespin clamped on your fingernail hurts quite a lot, and hurts even more (albeit briefly) when you take it off and circulation returns*.

If I could arrange something like that to happen whenever I eat, that would be useful.  I did have a TENS unit that never helped my chronic pain, but some of its higher settings could be quite uncomfortable.  I suppose it might be useful to train myself, though it would require setting it up and activating it every time I ate.  Also, I’m almost sure that I threw it away in frustration because it didn’t work.

It would be really useful if I could somehow trigger nausea any time I ate, as in the style of aversion training seen in A Clockwork Orange.  I suppose I could try to force myself to eat eggplant with every meal…but no, I don’t think I could.  It’s very hard to force oneself to eat things that make one feel sick.  That’s the whole point of this line of thought.  I guess I could look for some syrup of ipecac.  I’ve never used that, but I think they used to use it to make people throw up if they’d eaten something poisonous or the like.  It might be worth a try.  I think I’ll send myself a reminder to look it up on Amazon.

The train just arrived.  I must say, Tri-Rail seems to have deteriorated slightly since changing their schedules, but maybe they’re just in the middle of making adjustments.  I try to give other people and organizations the benefit of the doubt when I can.  The Principle of Charity is one that I think would be very useful for society as a whole, or at least for humans:  the idea of trying to see what people say and do from the best possible light you can, instead of reflexively assuming the worst, of getting judgmental and self-righteous and assuming anything you find even slightly uncomfortable is a personal attack on you, precisely because you feel uncomfortable.

If I took that attitude, I could definitely see myself trying to destroy the world or even the universe, because a lot of reality bothers me a lot of the time.  Fortunately, I know that my feelings are my problem and my responsibility, not anyone else’s.

Not that I don’t fantasize about global and even universal destruction when I’m feeling particularly pan-antipathic.  I imagine working to perfect technology to adjust the course of asteroids.  I could even sneakily get government funding to do so, but then I could actually use the technology to steer near-Earth objects toward the Earth rather than away from it.  Some good asteroid hits might be extinction-level events, and a comet impact (of sufficient size) could wipe out nearly all life on Earth.

I say “nearly” because some microbes are remarkably resilient.

Of course, if one could study the possibility of vacuum decay‒causing, for instance, the cosmological constant or the Higgs Field to quantum tunnel to a lower energy level‒that would produce a wavefront process that would obliterate all forms of matter, a wavefront that would expand at the speed of light and wipe out everything.

Well…it wouldn’t literally wipe out everything, actually.  First off, it would leave behind whatever cosmos is entailed in the new Higgs (or other field) set-point.  And, of course, beyond our cosmic horizon, there are bits of reality that are moving away from us‒carried by the expansion of spacetime itself‒at faster than the speed of light.  So the vacuum decay wave would never reach them.  But it would obliterate everything in the observable universe, and that might be heartwarming enough.

Vacuum decay, though, may not even be a physical possibility‒it’s not a consensus prediction, though there are reasons to think it might be possible‒according to the best models we have of cosmic history, the Higgs field did settle out in a non-zero state after the electroweak era, and if inflationary cosmology is correct, then the “inflaton” field similarly decayed.

Still, we also have no idea how (or if) such a decay could be triggered.  There is no apparent risk of initiating it through highly energetic physics, because there are constant, extremely high energy processes happening in the cosmos, and everything we can see is all still there, as are we.

Oh, and contrary to the X-Men comics’ Phoenix/Dark Phoenix saga, unfortunately, a “neutron galaxy” would not be “The End of All That Is”.  If such a “neutron galaxy” were to “appear” in the middle of the Milky Way, that would be bad for us, though its effects would take a while, since even gravity doesn’t travel faster than the speed of light.  But effectively, a “neutron” galaxy would be no more cosmically devastating than a supermassive black hole with the mass of a hundred billion suns or so.  That’s a big black hole, bigger than any we’ve seen (and probably too big to be expected to exist at the current age of the cosmos), and as with any black hole, if you get too close it can be bad news**, but from a distance its effects would be no more harmful than an ordinary galaxy of equivalent mass.

Oh, well, I’ll have to keep brainstorming ways to destroy the world or humanity at least.  Maybe biology is the way to go‒it might be possible to genetically engineer something like the Blob or the Chicken Heart that Ate the World.  Or one could deliberately make an AI that has the terminal goal to turn everything into paperclips, not by accident but on purpose.  That would be humorously ironic.  Or one could just make an AI nanobot, Von Neumann probe-style thing that literally had the sole programming to replicate itself as much and as fast as possible, using every available resource.

I’ve written before about how such a thing could even instantiate a new kind of galaxy-level natural selection.

I wonder what would happen if I tried to crowd-source a project to end all life in the universe, maybe with a “GoFundMe” page…

Anyway, my station is coming up, so I’ll draw my insane musings to a close for now.  I don’t know if I’ll write anything tomorrow.

*Don’t worry, this was not something anyone else ever did to me.  This was something with which I experimented on myself, because while it was painful, it was quite fascinating that the pain got worse when I first took the clothespin off.

**Although, with one that big, you could probably traverse the event horizon without tidal forces killing you‒at least not just yet‒by spaghettification, so it might at least allow for some interesting final experiences.

by

Not all new things from Microsoft et al are annoying

I did a little talking into the microphone this morning about a few things, including the above–relating specifically to the “Clipchamp” video editing software from Microsoft, which actually seems pretty darn good, all things considered, and my futile dreams of more deeply studying subjects in Physics that I like, and some about walking, but finally about how I’m not up to anything.

I may not make this into a video on YouTube.  I did make yesterday’s audio into a “video”.  If anyone wants me to do that with THIS audio, let me know.

Anyway, for all you gluttons for punishment, here is yesterday’s audio turned into video:

And here is the audio from today:

If such a thing is possible, enjoy.

by

Causality, relativity, uncertainty, and attractive versus repulsive gravity–these are worth celebrating

Okay, well, I’m writing this blog post from the office, because this is where I slept last night after the holiday party.  We did not have the party at the office, just to be clear.  We had it at a very decent restaurant called Maggiano’s, which may be part of a chain to some extent, I think.  It was a nice enough restaurant, food-wise, and the building and the outside lights were quite beautiful (see below).  However, inside, it was way too crowded and noisy, and we were seated at a very long, narrow table against a wall.

I felt incredibly stressed when we first arrived; I can hardly hear out of my right ear for one, and I have had tinnitus in it since about 2007 or so, and everything else was a tumult and commotion.  There was too much visual sensory overload also, and way too many people in too close quarters.  I miss the social mores of the pandemic, honestly.  I was barely able to endure long enough for our server to get me a drink so I could calm down a little.  I almost left and just walked back to the office.

My difficulties with such things have gotten worse over time, probably at least partly because I only ever used to go to restaurants and whatnot with people with whom I felt quite comfortable—my family, near and extended, then my wife, her family, our family, and so on—so there was always someone on whom I could focus, and with whom I could speak.

The drinks were rather weak, which may be good, since it was a work night, but I had to drink several to keep from tensing up.  Even so, at the end of the night, when they wanted to take a big group photo, I just walked away.  I had been dodging pictures all night already; there was a terribly annoying number of them, because everyone has their own little cameras in their smartphones, so instead of conversation—which was very difficult with anyone more than one seat away, and pretty hard even with those neighbors—people just took their little, instant, digital snaps, which I suspect will never really be used for recalling memories.

I’ve said it before, it’s not the case that things on the internet (or smartphones or whatever) are forever, as is sometimes claimed.  There is such a cacophony of data and images and whatnot, a good portion of it now not even being “real”, that most things will be swiftly lost like a drop of ink in a roiling, stormy ocean, or the quantum information of something that’s fallen in a black hole.  In principle it’s all there, but in practice it’s as lost as the echoes of Julius Caesar’s death rattle.

I guess it was a pretty nice evening, and the food was pretty good.  The salad was above average, and the broccoli I had on the side with my ziti dish was good.  It was all certainly well above the level of, for instance, the Olive Garden, but it was terribly noisy, literally and figuratively.  By the end, when we were the last party in the restaurant, it was still noisy, because our group was terribly noisy, and it was embarrassing and unpleasant.

I think I mostly at least prevented anyone from capturing my disgusting current face and form on camera in anything other than, perhaps, an oblique angle.  I really don’t like how I look, or how I feel, and certainly don’t want it memorialized, even if it’s evanescent and ephemeral*.

After the party, I was brought back to the office, which is only about four miles from the restaurant.  I could have walked, since the night was reasonably cool, but since I knew I wouldn’t be taking a shower, I decided not to do that.  I have washed up this morning and applied antiperspirant and aftershave (or whatever you call it when you haven’t actually shaved) and I brushed my teeth and everything.  I slept on the floor, with my backpack as my pillow, and it was about as comfortable as sleeping at the house, and I got about 3 hours of sleep.

This is the state in which my life is and has been for years now:  sleeping at the office and spending time here (by myself) is just as pleasant as being at the place where I nominally live.  That’s because I have no life, and I don’t expect one to occur again for me.  I’m really absolutely dismal and morose and unpleasant, even to myself.

I’ve hardly even read anything in over three weeks now, which is very weird and rare for me.  The single thing to which I’m now looking forward is the Doctor Who Christmas special, and that’s not a huge draw, just a pleasant one.  It’s not as though I’m actually watching it with anyone or can talk about it with a friend or anything.

I got out the hardcover books Spacetime and Geometry and Quantum Field Theory, As Simply as Possible at the office.  I have them resting on the desk, hoping to entice myself during any downtime I might have at work.  So far it hasn’t paid off, but I would like to master the mathematics of GR well enough that I can understand intuitively why a uniform energy field permeating space generates “repulsive gravity”.  I understand that it does, but I don’t have a good picture of it in my head, whereas I do have a much clearer intuitive sense of why the curvature of spacetime (especially the time part) leads to the apparent force of attractive gravity.

In a way, that’s my only remaining unaccomplished (and reasonably achievable) goal.  Quantum field theory is interesting and all, but the basic concepts of it seem fairly straightforward to me**.  Contrary to what people often say, quantum mechanics (et al) are only really counter-intuitive if you insist upon trying to apply macroscopic and mesoscopic intuitions to phenomena that happen at much smaller scales.  It’s a bit like expecting one of your bathroom tiles to behave just like the Burj Khalifa, only the scale is much more disparate between the quantum and the macroscopic.

People seem somehow puzzled by the notion of how complementary pairs of one’s measurements of quantum “particles” can never be more accurate than a certain level, as if this is truly different from measurements of macroscopic phenomena.  I’m quite sure that the errors when measuring, say, the mass or velocity of something as large as an elephant, or a car, or what have you, are waaaaaay huger than the absolute uncertainty in measurement of the position and/or momentum of a particle.  They’re just not as noticeable because the thing itself is big, and so the percentage of the error might be smaller and less consequential.

But we know things change with scale, like surface to volume ratios and whatnot.  An uncertainty of a millimeter when measuring a blue whale is hardly relevant, but if you’re measuring an ant, it could easily be crucial, and if you’re measuring a dust mite that error would be larger than the organism.

I also don’t get the objection to the possible “many worlds” description of quantum mechanics that derives from the fact that we only ever see and experience one world.  I don’t know why that puzzles people.  It’s not as if you can see both the outside and the inside of all the solid objects around you.  If you touch the near surface of a basketball with one finger, you can’t feel the opposite side of the ball with the same finger at the same time.

Yet, there’s no real doubt that the inside and the other side of physical objects really exist.  We just can’t sense the whole of any given thing at once.  Any part of space that will never enter our future light cones is something we will never, ever see at all***, but we don’t have any good reason to doubt that far distant regions of spacetime exist.  Internal consistency of reality and logical coherence of the world seem to demand many things existing with which we will not, and sometimes cannot, ever interact.

Okay, that was a weird tangent.  My apologies.  Anyway, I doubt that I’m going to achieve my “dream” of getting an intuitive, mathematical understanding, something I can feel, about why spacetime expands in the presence of a uniform energy.  After all, it’s something about which I honestly care, and my track record with such things is abysmal.  I don’t expect to achieve anything else of value, even to me, in my life.

I’m tired, I’m sad, I’m depressed, I’m alone; the only person in whose presence I always find myself is a person I despise (me).  My catharsis via this blog isn’t working.  I’m getting no help, though I wish for it, but I’m not sure how well I would respond if some were to come.  Maybe, like the wonderful simile Sting used in Be Still My Beating Heart, I would wriggle like a fish caught on dry land, unable to tell the difference between help and danger, between an offer of comfort and a warning of pain.

Whatever.  Sorry, that’s all pathetic, isn’t it?

In closing, I wonder if anyone listened to my little audio snippet yesterday, and if anyone thought it was worth it for me to try to do such a thing more often.  Let me know in the comments (on WordPress) if you have any feedback to offer.  Thanks.

maggianos

*Performing together live, for the first time.

**Straightforward for quantum field theory type things, anyway, to be fair.  I don’t mean that it’s not complex (ha ha! it uses complex numbers all the time, get it?) but I have a sort of picture of how the processes work, and it makes sense.  The rest would just be building details and specifics on top of the basic framework, which is a lot, of course, but there’s no real intellectual hurdle to be cleared.

***Assuming we do not discover any exceptions or workarounds to special relativity and the speed-of-causality limit.  There could in principle be workarounds, but it seems unlikely that there are local exceptions to the cosmic speed limit.  In any case, even such exceptions shouldn’t violate chains of causality.

by

Believing in “believing in” matters of empirical reality…or not

The other day, I was scrolling through The Website Formerly Known as Twitter—which I tend to do after sharing my blog posts there, since it seems the polite thing to do—and I saw a “tweet” or an “X-udate” or “X-cretion” or whatever one calls them now, that asked, “Do you believe in global warming?”

Such questions always seem bizarre to me.  It’s similar to the old, “Do you believe in UFOs?”  Though, with the latter, one can always snarkily reply, “Why, yes, I believe in unidentified flying objects.  I think people often see things in the sky that they cannot properly identify, especially if they are not experts and conditions are not ideal.”  But really, even that sarcastic response misses the point and can be misleading, so it’s best to be avoided.

The problem is, the question entails a kind of category error.  The reality of global warming—by which I assume the questioner means some form of anthropogenic climate change—is an empirical question.  It is a statement about reality itself, and is either true or false whether or not anyone even knows about it as a possibility, let alone “believes in it”.

It’s more reasonable to ask, “Do you believe that anthropogenic climate change—AKA global warming—is happening?”  That, at least, is a sensible question, when using the form of the word “belief” that means that, based on the evidence and reasoning one has available, one has arrived at the provisional conclusion that global warming is happening (or is not).

In using this term “belief”, one would usually imply that one is reasonably convinced, but open in principle to alternative explanations and counter arguments and new evidence—as one always should be in matters of empirical fact, at least if one is committed to always trying to make one’s map describe the territory as well as possible (to borrow a phrase from Eliezer Yudkowsky).

But when people say, “Do you believe in…” something, it doesn’t come across—to me at least—like a question about facts, but rather as a question about ideologies, about team membership, about religion, in a way.  It can be at least excusable and appropriate, if still rather nonsensical in my view, to ask someone if they believe in Santa Claus, or in Communism, or in God.  It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with external reality other than the state of certain people’s minds, but at least it’s reasonably appropriate.

The absurdity of this conflation of “believing in” something with an assessment of a thing’s actual reality is pointed out well in Terry Pratchett’s delightful Discworld novels—in either Wyrd Sisters or Witches Abroad, if memory serves.  I don’t recall how the point comes up, but it relates to belief in the gods of Discworld.  The narration says that, of course, witches knew that the gods were real, they had dealings with them, they sometimes met them.  But that didn’t mean there was any call to go believing in them.  It would be like believing in the postman.

If someone were to ask me whether I think that climate change is real, and why I think whatever I think, I might reply that the general consensus of the world’s climate scientists—people who actually specialize in the area—seems to be that it is happening, and though their most specific predictions can be highly uncertain, as can all specific predictions in science beyond the realms of simple linear dynamics, most of them conclude that it is really happening.

I read a statement once that claimed that the percentage of climate scientists who are convinced that human-caused global warming is really happening is higher than the percentage of medical scientists who are convinced that smoking tobacco increases the risk of lung cancer.  I don’t know whether that statement is true, and I don’t recall the source—it sounds more like a rhetorical point than an actual argument, which makes me suspicious.  If it is true, it’s remarkable in more than one direction.

One can look up in journals the papers and the data that is being gathered and analyzed by climate scientists.  Google Scholar works nicely for searching out real, published scientific studies on almost any amendable topic.  One can also go to pre-print servers such as arXiv, to see papers that have not yet been peer reviewed.

If one is judicious, one can even find decent science news in less technical publications—phys.org seems to be pretty good—but mainstream reporting on such things is often unreliable and inconsistent, since after all mainstream media exist primarily to sell themselves, not necessarily to promulgate the most rigorous truth they can uncover.  Even Scientific American has turned into a twisted mockery of its former self.

I understand at least some of the physics behind the “greenhouse effect”, without which the Earth would be uninhabitably cold.  Visible light passes through the atmosphere without interacting much with the gases therein—which is why air is mostly transparent, other than the modest scattering of blue light that leads to the sky’s daytime color (and inversely to the color of sunsets).  But such relatively low-entropy, high frequency light is absorbed by the ground, then reemitted as higher entropy, lower frequency light, such as infrared, which is much more readily absorbed by molecules like CO2 and H2O and methane (CH4).  The reasons for this are quantum mechanical in nature, but the fact that it happens is basic physics that’s been well known since before anyone currently alive was born, as far as I know.

And so, these atmospheric gases heat up (and in turn heat up the other atmospheric gases) until the outer surface of the atmosphere is warm enough to radiate out as much energy as comes into the Earth.  Such is the nature of so-called black body radiation.

But for the outer atmosphere to be warm enough to do this, the middle atmosphere must be warmer, and the layer below warmer still, and so on, since outer layers radiate inward as well as outward.  The outer layer of the atmosphere will always be just warm enough to radiate out just as much energy as the Earth receives in light from the sun; if it were not, the Earth would rapidly get hotter until a new equilibrium was reached.  The final radiating surface might end up being higher in the atmosphere, which would mean that, closer to the surface, things would be warmer.

Anyone who has dressed in layers in cold weather should understand this intuitively.

[By the way, there may be some slight imprecisions in my very quick summary above of the thermodynamics of atmospheric gases, so if any experts in the matter would like to make any corrections—especially if such corrections are truly substantive—please feel free to do so in the comments.]

There are other atmospheric effects that are even easier to understand at basic chemical levels, such as the fact that increasing CO2  concentration leads to increasing acidification of the oceans.  This is fairly straightforward chemistry—carbon dioxide, when dissolved in water, partially reacts to form a weak acid—“weak” meaning just that the hydrogen ions do not completely dissociate from the molecule H2CO3*.  This can be demonstrated easily by getting some pH paper (readily available at all high street pH paper shops), testing some neutral water (to confirm its baseline neutral pH) and then blowing through a straw into the water for a few minutes.  You can then check if the pH has dropped, which—if you are a typical mammalian creature from Earth—it will have done.

I think this experiment can also be done with phenolphthalein, which is wine-red when in a basic (alkaline) solution and clear when in an acidic environment.  You can do a sort of magic trick, turning “wine” into “water” with just your breath through a straw bubbling in a glass.  Don’t drink it, though.  I don’t think phenolphthalein is particularly dangerous, but I wouldn’t want to endorse someone imbibing it.

I’m not going to tell you my conclusions about the empirical fact of whether or not “global warming” is happening and how and why and all that.  You can explore the subject as a homework assignment (but don’t hand it in to me).  But I will tell you my conclusion, which is probably obvious, about “believing in” things.  I don’t believe in “global warming” nor in the lack thereof.  I don’t believe in Santa Claus.  I don’t believe in Capitalism or Communism or Socialism or Fascism or Scientism** or Antidisestablishmentarianism.  I don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy, and I don’t believe in life after love.

And I really don’t believe it’s useful or good or anything but an irrationality to “believe in” matters that involve claims about the nature of reality itself.  Reality is that which exists whether or not anyone believes in it—indeed, whether or not anyone exists to be capable of believing in it.  That’s why it’s reality, as opposed to fictions and ideologies and other abstract concepts of various kinds.

I know*** that Amazon delivery people exist.  That doesn’t mean there’s any call to go believing in them.

* H2O + CO2 ⇌ H2CO3 ⇌ H+ + HCO3–.  Something like that, anyway.

** Though I have more sympathy for Scientism than most “isms”.

***Not to a mathematical certainty, but to such a high degree that there’s no clear point in considering other possibilities, pending new evidence and/or arguments.

by

Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

…because I did warn you:  it’s Saturday, and I’m writing a blog post, because I’m on my way in to the office.

I think there was a brief moment in the middle of the day yesterday when the boss considered just keeping everything closed for the weekend, but then there were at least three people besides me and the “closer” who were planning to come in.  Since they are paid on commission (so extra work is an opportunity for them) I can’t feel too bad about having to come in, too.  As I wrote yesterday, it’s not as though I have anything better to do with my time.

Actually, today of all days, that’s not quite correct.  Today is the day of the first of the 60th anniversary Doctor Who specials, which I mentioned yesterday.  But since that is supposed to be streaming on Disney Plus, I can watch it from work (things are often slow-ish on Satudays) just as easily as at the house, and I will probably be more comfortable at the office.  My desk chair is decent, whereas at the house I basically sit on the floor.

Now that we are past the main temptation holidays, at least until Christmas/New Years, I need to go back onto a stricter diet.  I find that my physical energy is much better when I’m controlling my input.  This might seem ironic, given that I’m restricting input of the most easily “usable” calories, but the biochemistry and physiology of this fact is entirely reasonable and well understood.

It does sometimes have a detrimental affect on my mood, decreasing my emotional energy somewhat—which I guess makes my sugar cravings/sweet tooth a bit akin to the addiction of someone who uses illicit drugs to “self-treat” an underlying mood disorder.  This shouldn’t be too surprising, since sugar triggers activity in the nucleus accumbens and related centers of the nervous system that is very similar to what cocaine and amphetamines do.

I also should just avoid alcohol—not because I have a big problem with it or anything, but because it doesn’t actually make me feel good, even in the moment, but I kind of expect it to do so, and by the time I realize, “Hey, this isn’t even helping me relax or making me feel good while it’s on board”, I’ve already bought myself some GI and neurological discomfort later.

Sorry, I know this is all boring.  In a way, though, everyone is boring to most other people, or at least not terribly interesting.  And many people who are apparently interesting to so many other people are actually astonishingly uninteresting to me.  For instance, though I recognize her talent and skill and brilliance, I have no particular interest in Taylor Swift’s career or music—except to recognize those stated attributes—and I certainly have no interest in her love life.  Yet, since I do follow the news fairly regularly, I cannot help but become aware of these things.

To be fair to her, she’s much more interesting than most celebrities*.

I suppose it’s a small price to pay for making sure that I get my news input from a variety of different sources to try to avoid bias—or, at least, to balance the biases against each other as much as I can.  I don’t generally like to take in commentary on news, so I avoid editorials; I can decide what I think about issues for myself once I have the data and don’t need pundits to tell me what they think I ought to think.  I’m only too aware of studies that have generally shown that such pundits’ predictions on various news events are no better than, and quite often significantly worse than, chance.

In other words, if you get your news from sources that editorialize, let alone from pundits, you’re actually worsening your likelihood of getting a good take on events in the world.  Why not just get a “magic 8-ball” and save yourself the trouble, while ironically improving your odds?

Mind you, there are people with expertise from whom I might be interested in hearing (or reading) their take on particular, narrow issues within their wheelhouse.  For science and related news, for instance, I go to a few specific science-related YouTube channels like Dr. Becky, and PBS Space Time, and Sabine Hossenfelder, and Sixty Symbols and Deep Sky Videos and Periodic Videos and Numberphile and Computerphile—those last five are all channels pioneered by Brady Haran, a remarkably intelligent and curious science and math journalist who gets experts to discuss science (and mathematical and computer-related) stories.  He asks very good questions.

I find that the mainstream media does just an unacceptably sloppy job at conveying science news, on average.  To be fair to them, the standard deviation of that sloppiness is pretty big, so some good work happens now and then, but it’s well into one small tail of the curve.  Sadly enough, even Scientific American has become a severe embarrassment to itself—and it’s even more embarrassing that the editors thereof don’t seem even to realize how embarrassing they’ve become.  I used to love that magazine, but it’s dead to me now.

Anyway, enough kvetching.  My train will be here soon, and I’ll be on my way to the office.  I hope to have at least one hour of today that is quite fun—the Doctor Who special—and I certainly always get some satisfaction from writing these posts, at least when it’s clear that people are reading them.  I hope you all have a good remainder of the weekend, and I will return Monday morning, barring the unforeseen.

*Even David Tennant, for instance, is mainly interesting only as the Doctor (or as Hamlet, or in one of his other roles).  Ditto for the other Doctors, and for musicians whose work I enjoy, and for writers I like to read, and even for scientists whose work I follow.  I guess it makes sense; people are most interesting when they’re doing what it is that they do that is exceptional.

by

Be thankful you’re not a simulation. Or are you?

I’m writing this on my phone for the first time in quite a while, seated in the rear of an Uber, on the way to the office.  This was something of a whim‒the phone writing, I mean, not the Uber.  The Uber was a carefully considered choice, and it is relatively cheap because of the hour at which I’m taking it.  It’s not something I would do on a regular basis, at least not for long.  Maybe if I finally give up and decide to die in short order I might just burn a lot of money on Ubers.  I doubt it, though.

No, the whim is deciding to write on the phone, since I have some down time in the back seat.  I could use my laptop, but that feels slightly weirder or more uncomfortable to me, though I’m not sure why that’s the case.  I could also just wait until I got to the office to start, because I’m going to be very early.

The reason for going to the office by Uber is that I made the mistake of ordering an Amazon “Try Before You Buy” article of clothing‒a somewhat expensive one.  It did not fit right.  But then I learned that Amazon doesn’t do a pickup to return items like that; you need to drop them at a Whole Foods or a UPS store or similar.

That was not clear to me when I was using the option, or I wouldn’t have done it.  I have no straightforward way to get to any of the above locations, and even to use Uber to get to one would require going during working hours.  I had to arrange for a UPS pickup, at my expense, but I had to set it up to happen at the office, because I won’t be at the house during the day for ten more days (at least on days UPS does such pickups) and that’s past the pickup time window for the “Try Before You Buy” system.

So, here I am, bringing a cumbersome, and not too light, package to the office with me so that UPS can pick it up between 9 and 6.  I never want to do this sort of thing again.  It was foolish of me to try a rather expensive article of clothing anyway, but I guess it was sort of an attempt to cheer myself up with an indulgence.

That sure misfired, didn’t it?

Speaking of cheering oneself up with indulgence‒or with the inability to do so‒tomorrow is Thanksgiving for my fellow United Statesians.  We don’t call this evening “Thanksgiving Eve”, which feels like a shame to me, but certainly people do start celebrating the holiday, in a sense, quite early.  I think many people take the whole week off work.

I, on the other hand, am not really going to be doing anything to celebrate.  The closest I might come is walking to a gas station not too far from the house, where they tend to have pretty decent pre-made turkey sandwiches with mildly cranberry-associated topping.  It’s not very impressive, nor is it terribly satisfying.  I’d feel much better, I think, if I were able simply to go to sleep tonight and sleep through until Friday morning.  As it is, I probably won’t be able to sleep or rest any more than usual, and that’s even counting my plan to take some Benadryl tonight.

I’m almost at the office, so I’ll take a brief pause here and resume after I arrive.  You may not notice the gap.

Did you notice it?  I’m guessing you probably recognize that it happened, but only because I told you that it was happening.  Like the scenes in a movie that’s been filmed over months and months, or the paragraphs of a long novel like my forced two-parter Unanimity that was written and edited over the course of more than a year, the final product may end up relatively seamless despite a long and discontinuous origin.

I’ve occasionally imagined that it might be possible (in principle, anyway) for our reality to be a simulation in which each moment‒maybe each Planck time‒in every location in space‒perhaps each cubic Planck length‒is prepared individually, one by one, then subsequent and nearby ones are calculated based on the laws of physics, and each next place and time is then updated piece by piece, one infinitesimal space and one instant of time at a time, as it were*.

The simulator could take a trillion years to calculate even one second of the spacetime in the visible universe, probably far longer.  But it wouldn’t really matter, necessarily**, how long it took, provided there was enough memory available to keep everything stored.  From the outside, the process of one human life (and its past and future light cones) might take a googol years to calculate, but from the inside point of view, for the human being “simulated”, time would just progress normally.

It doesn’t matter to the people in a video, for instance, if their video is viewed at 2x speed or .25x speed; for them it all happens the same way no matter what.  It doesn’t matter to the characters in a Studio Ghibli movie that their individual movie cels each took hours to be painstakingly drawn and painted, or if a Pixar character took even longer to be computer generated.  Their “experience” would pass at one frame per frame, or 24 frames per experienced “second” for them (at traditional movie frame rates).

Even if each second of the person’s life took a trillion eons to simulate, it would still be experienced just as a second for that person.

A rather weird and possibly disquieting implication of this is that, if those simulating the person stopped doing it‒perhaps they got bored, or had a power cut, or suffered a natural disaster or catastrophe in their meta-level universe‒the simulation would just…stop.  It’s not that the people in the simulated universe would die in any conventional sense; certainly they would not die in the usual within-the-universe meaning of dying.  Nor would their universe “die” as if some cataclysm like a phase change in the vacuum energy occurred***.  It would just stop.

There would be no next moment, no next occurrence*****.  If someone were later to restart that simulation for whatever reason, even if it was ten to the thousand to the googol years later or more, the people within the simulation would experience no difference between the before pause and after pause moments than between any other two moments in their existence.

But if the simulation were stopped and never restarted, with perhaps all associated memory erased…well, again, the inhabitants would not experience it in any possible, conceivable sense, any more than a video game character experiences the moments when and after you reset the game or the power goes out.  If you are a simulated existence, and the simulation is permanently stopped, you will not so much die as cease to have any manner of existence whatsoever.

Have a happy Thanksgiving.

happy-thanksgiving-from-the-farm-maria-keady

*It’s interesting also to think of, for instance, two “people” starting to simulate such a universe from different points in space and time, and to wonder what would happen when they came together if their simulations did not mesh perfectly, like frost on a window-pane with multiple initial points of nucleation leading to a “fractured” pattern.  But that’s a different, if related, thought process.

**From the point of view of the “simulated” universe, anyway.  It’s hard to see anyone having the commitment or desire to bother actually carrying out such a laborious simulation; that would be quite a dreary task.

***This is a possible occurrence in an ordinary, physics-related sense.  If the “dark energy” is indeed the cosmological constant (called lambda, Λ, as in the ΛCDM model of cosmology) but is not at its lowest “vacuum state”, then it could spontaneously “tunnel” down to a lower, more stable set-point.  This would wipe out every particle in the current universe in a growing sphere, with its outer shell expanding at the speed of light.  Of course, that means that you could never, in principle, have any warning that it was happening, nor could you, even in principle, experience your destruction and that of everything else that exists.  This is not the same manner of cessation as what I discuss in the main body of the post‒it is very much a within-simulation event, not a meta-level one‒but it would still be just an instantaneous erasure of sorts, happening too fast to be experienced even in principle****.  There are many worse ways to die.  Indeed, almost all ways humans do die are much worse than this.

**** Presumably, quantum information would be conserved even in this catastrophe, whereas in a halted and erased simulation, that principle wouldn’t apply, at least within the simulation.  Whether it would apply to the process of simulating and then ceasing to do so would depend on the nature of the meta-level universe.

*****I suppose this is analogous to what will happen to everything in the universes of my stories Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado if I never finish those stories.

by

Is there such a thing as Von Oldmann architecture?

It’s Wednesday morning, and here I am at the train station, writing my blog post for the day.  It’s quite wet and windy, which might have been a decent situation in which to do some walking, but I’m still feeling quite under the weather, so I haven’t done any walking of more than a mile at a time this week.  Last night/yesterday evening, I walked to the train station from work, and I had an umbrella, but it was terribly windy, so even though I was able to keep my head (and my backpack) mostly dry, my legs were soaked by the time I got to the station.

This morning, it’s not raining as hard, but it is drizzling and windy.  I considered just wearing a rain coat today, but I realized that wouldn’t protect my legs any more than the umbrella would.  I do have a long, duster-style coat that I guess I could have worn.  Maybe if it’s still windy and rainy tomorrow, I’ll wear that.

I also considered not going to the office today, but it’s Wednesday, which means it’s payroll day, so I need to go.

I started a new mantra (of sorts) yesterday, consistent with the way I expressed myself in yesterday’s post—indeed, I started it even as I walked from the train to the office in the morning:  I said, “I hate the world, I hate my life, I hate myself.”  This was, to no one’s surprise, not at all difficult for me to maintain, unlike my former attempt at saying that I loved those things (as if to convince myself) which made my metaphorical tongue turn to metaphorical sand in my metaphorical mouth.

The new mantra is strangely freeing.  It didn’t make me nearly as tense or uncomfortable as I worried that it might.  If anything, it allowed a sense of detaching.  I didn’t feel any actual hostility or malice toward the world—there was no weird desire for revenge or destruction or what have you.  I don’t think the world ever even pretended to owe me anything good, and it certainly does not owe me anything good.  So I can’t feel any sense of affront, or wounded pride, or anything idiotic like that.

Don’t get me wrong; I can be and am idiotic in plenty of other ways.  I’m just not idiotic in that particular way.  As for hating my life and hating myself, well, what else is new?  Accepting it, saying it, has its benefits.  If I hate myself anyway, why would I care what happens to me?

I realized that this might not be the healthiest thing to have going through my mind, so I decided to provide a counterpoint by listening to the David Burns book on Cognitive Therapy, Feeling Good.  I’ve read the book before; I was recommended it by a therapist.  I’ve even done many of the exercises therein.

I recognize the value of the ideas in the book, and I know that CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) has been tested well and provides good results for many.  It’s also logical and rational in many ways, and that’s always appealing.  So I started listening to the audio-book, even as I waited for the train and rode on it.

It did help me take a nap on the train; maybe that means some of its messages went into my subconscious.  It was a nice little nap, and I didn’t miss my stop, because I wasn’t sleeping all that deeply, despite my horrendous lack of sleep the previous two nights.

It’s sad to say, but I think my body and my nervous system have sort of adapted to getting very little sleep.  I’m not saying that they’re fine with it.  That would be absurd.  Sleep is clearly crucially important to life in creatures with any kind of nervous system as we know it.  This is obvious, even if we don’t quite know why, because every creature in the world that we know of with a nervous system spends a good portion of every planetary rotation in a relatively dormant and quite vulnerable state.  If evolution were able to allow for function without sleep, one would think it would have cropped up somewhere, at least.

Of course, it’s possible that, way back in the dawn of nervous systems, hundreds of millions of years ago, life went down an accidental blind alley with respect to sleep and nerves.  Maybe the common ancestor of all nervous systems just happened upon a form of function that requires what we call sleep, and every descendant of that nervous system is stuck with a requirement that need not have been the case if some different solution to creating nervous systems had been happened upon, but it wasn’t, and so sleep cannot be escaped except by a reinvention of the nervous system by some life form.  That’s unlikely to happen for reasons similar to why new types of abiogenesis aren’t going to happen in an already crowded biosphere:  anything new would be horrendously outcompeted by life forms that have hundreds of millions to three and a half billion years advantage.

I’m dubious, though, about the possible accidental and fundamentally nonessential nature of sleep.  This is at least partly due to the recognition that even our computers eventually need to be updated and, more importantly, rebooted to function optimally.

Computers bear very little similarly to nerve cells or literal nervous systems; they were never designed to mimic nerves, anymore than an internal combustion engine was designed to mimic muscles and legs.  Von Neumann architecture has very little in common with the way nervous systems store and process information.  The former does storage and processing separately; nervous systems seem to do it as part and parcel of the very same processes.

Anyway, my point is, I don’t think I need less sleep just because for a long time I have achieved less sleep.  I think my body, my mind, my nervous system has adjusted as best it can to keep from completely falling apart—literally—in response to truly chronic insomnia.  But the system is still wearing down and suffering damage; believe me, I can tell.

I’m almost sure that at least part of my chronic pain is related to my insomnia, especially the pains that arise other than where the more concrete source of my pain is located.  And there’s clearly an association between my insomnia and my depression/dysthymia.  It’s difficult to say if one causes the other or the other causes the one or if they’re both caused by some third thing—possibly some form of autism spectrum disorder—but I give very low credence to them being only coincidentally correlated.

In any case, I am proceeding in two apparently conflicting directions at once, now:  I’m repeating a mantra that doesn’t seem in any way to come up against resistance in my mind, but which is certainly not what one could consider positive.  And I’m repeating my exposure and exploration of CBT, starting with Feeling Good.  None of it is new to me, nor are there any revelations likely to come.

I understand the points that are made in CBT, I understand and recognize the cognitive distortions associated with depression that it strives to combat.  I’m open to the possibilities, but I’m not sure it’s the right tool for the job, in my case.  I suspect my depression/dysthymia may be quasi-organic, in the sense of being more truly fundamental to the operation of my own weird little alien nervous system.

But I could be wrong, and I don’t like to jump to conclusions too precipitously.  So, I’ll finish listening to the book, and maybe get one of his other books with this month’s Audible credit.  But I’m also not going to try to extinguish the repetition of “I hate the world, I hate my life, I hate myself” in my head.  If it goes away on its own, that’s fine.  Otherwise, it’s at least something consistent onto which to hold.  And it’s weirdly both freeing and calming, and that’s worth a lot to me.

by

Meandering thoughts early on a Saturday morning

As I noted above, it’s early Saturday morning, and here in south Florida, it’s already 80 degrees (Fahrenheit) and muggy, despite it being the 11th of November.

The trees here don’t change color, there’s always mold and mildew and stuff like that, annoying insects are pretty much always out and about throughout the year, and I’m sure there are lots of other things worth reviling about the area.  I won’t even get into the politics and the general idiocy levels and the bureaucracies, because they’re probably not significantly worse here than anywhere else; they’re just different and weird, because it’s Florida.

I do enjoy being able to see the various reptiles that abound here most of the year.  You definitely don’t get many lizards in Michigan, even in the summer; you’ll see the occasional turtle here and there, and if you go into the woods, once or twice you might encounter a snake.  But it’s mostly mammals and birds (and various Arthropoda when the weather is warm) up there, and in pretty much all but the southernmost US states.

Mind you, Hawaii had no endemic mammals (if you don’t count humans) for quite a long time.  It’s the most isolated archipelago on the face of the Earth; how could mammals have reached it?  Birds, sure.  Insects—well, they can get almost anywhere*.  Amphibians—it’s more difficult, but they can hitch a ride on floating vegetation, as can many reptiles, since they don’t tend to require as much food and fresh water as mammals do.  But how would a population of mammals from the mainland survive an accidental trip to the Hawaiian islands?  It’s not impossible, but to my knowledge, until humans brought them, no other mammals had come to those islands.

Florida, on the other hand—that second most southern of the United States, and the most southern of the continental United States**—has been part of the mainland for as long as human beings have existed, as far as I know.  Plenty of mammals abound here, in addition to the various birds and reptiles and amphibians and insects and other arthropods.

It’s my understanding that, until quite recently, actual jaguars lived in Florida!  I’m not talking about the Jacksonville football team.  I’m talking about the actual, third-largest member of the cat family (and the largest in the western hemisphere).  I’m talking about that brilliant, beautiful predator that can casually fetch crocodiles from the waters of the Amazon to eat.  I’m talking about the member of the big cat family that, instead of going for the throat, like most big cats do, tends to jump down on the back of its prey and crush the prey’s skull in its immensely powerful jaws.

Death by jaguar would probably not be pleasant, but it would at least be stylish and cool.  And if a jaguar eats you, you become part of one of the most magnificent predators on Earth.  While it’s true that humans are better predators—they are pretty much the most powerful predators ever on the planet—there are plain few of them that could be described as magnificent and sleek and imposing.

There are no more wild jaguars in Florida, and there are probably no more wild Florida panthers, either.  Instead, we have this horrible proliferation of Naked House Apes, the vast majority of whom are far from inspiring either to look at or with which to interact.  They succeed by dint of science and technology, of ideas the vast majority of them could not begin to describe or explain.

How many humans who regularly use the GPS system could explain why the system has to account for both special relativity and general relativity, or else it would be utterly useless and inaccurate?  How many of them even understand what is meant by a logic gate, even as they carry around spectacularly sophisticated computers in their pockets, which they use to take selfies*** and watch idiotic nonsense on TikTok?

How many people can’t interact with an idea that requires more than 240 characters to express?

I could go on and on, of course.  And I’ll admit that all of those positive things and ideas—engines and mathematics and circuits and piping and roads and farms and houses and medicine and so on—came from people who at least appeared to be human (though one often wonders if there isn’t some deep level of difference within the species such that some minds are barely the same type as many others).  But those people, and their ideas, are exceptions to the general rule and tendency.

Even nowadays, when we see so many of the fruits of the brilliant ideas of the likes of Ada Lovelace and Emmy Noether and their sistren****, we have to realize that there is such an abundance only because those ideas are so potent—they persist, they spread, they lead to other, subsequent, consequent ideas.

The prevalence or rate of occurrence of brilliance is probably no greater than ever before, as a matter of percentages, but there are more people—thanks to the products of past genius—and the edifice on which they rest is so much vaster and more stable and powerful that newer, still achingly rare instances of genius can build on those monumental, cyclopean, Olympian structures and devise things and ideas that could, in principle, in the long run, change the face of the very universe itself.

I don’t know what point I’m making here, today.  This is almost free-association or even “automatic writing”.  I guess it’s a good way to pass the time while I’m on my way to the office, which is at least a nearly decent way to pass some of my time on the way to the grave.  But I’m impatient to reach my destination.  I don’t feel very well.  I wish I could rest.  I’m really, really tired, and yet I never seem to be able to sleep much.

Oh, well.  The universe was clearly not made for my comfort, so I have no right to feel slighted or misled by it.  Then again, rights themselves are a human invention (or, just possibly, a human discovery), as are laws and customs and social patterns and all that happy horseshit.  The universe at large does not recognize any rights at all, unless you want to count the right (as well as the absolute obligation) to follow the laws of physics, whatever their ultimate nature might be.

That’s enough of my random brain exudates***** for the time being.  I hope you all have an excellent weekend.

*There are apparently endemic midges in Antarctica!

**At latitudes that roughly match those of Egypt, apparently.

***And how many of them understand how LCD screens (or LED screens) are different from the old CRT screens of traditional TVs (or what those acronyms mean), and why some people predicted that color TVs would become “extinct” because the earlier ones relied on certain rare-Earth elements, and why that prediction was incorrect because clever people figured out there were other ways to do the same thing?

****It’s horrible to realize that the reason it’s comparatively easy to list the women who have made astonishing contributions to human knowledge and understanding—these two I just mentioned having done no less than, respectively, basically inventing computer science and programming before the computers had even been built and codifying and mathematically explicating how conservation laws in physics derive from fundamental symmetries—is because women have been prevented from even exploring their potential in such areas throughout most of history in almost every culture.  Interactions with humans throughout my life has made it quite clear to me that the average human female is at least as intelligent as the average human male.  This implies that, over the course of human history, to a good first approximation, half of all potential genius has been not merely squandered but prevented.  It’s heartbreaking and soul-crushing to imagine all the possible art and poetry and science and philosophy and mathematics and music and so on and so on that might have existed already had women not been systematically prevented from developing their skills and ideas throughout most of human history.  If anyone ever wonders why I get depressed, this is one of the reasons.

*****I think the replacement for the term “tweet”, as in a posting on Twitter, should be something like an X-cretion, an X-udate, an X-trusion, or maybe even an X-foliation.

by

Urchins shall forth at vast of night that they may blog all exercise on thee.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, that day with which DentArthurDent always had so much trouble.  It’s the first Thursday in November, which means that (in the US) Thanksgiving will fall on the 23rd of November, since it’s celebrated on the 4th Thursday in November, which is always going to be 21 days after the 1st Thursday in November.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

I’m at the train station, and I was early even for the 610 train today.  I’m not going to get on the 610 train, because I still want to cool down* and begin this blog post, and it looks like the 630 is running on time.  I got here early partly because I got up early this morning…but really, that was only about 5 minutes earlier than usual, and it had little relation to when I first woke up.  The main reason, I believe, for my comparative earliness is that, as I mentioned yesterday, I tried to jog a bit this morning.

After getting to the end of my block and turning, I jogged 40 paces, as I had said I was going to do.  That was so comparatively easy and bracing that, at my next 90 degree turn, I did another 40 paces (each pace being 2 steps, at least the way I define the terms).  Then again at the next 90 degree turn, then at the last one.  So, I jogged a total of 160 paces, and walked the rest, and the jogging didn’t make me feel breathless or sore (so far) because it is such a limited amount.

It’s rather curious and amusing to note that my pedometer reads as if I’ve gone slightly less far than I usually do, because of course, jogging steps are quite a bit longer than walking steps, but the pedometer still just reads them as steps.

It’s a nice feeling to have done even that very little bit of running.  It’s a good way to start a day, to have accomplished that little bit of a goal, as part of a general pattern of exercise.  It is the first time (I think) that I’ve tried jogging while wearing a backpack.  That turns out not to have been a noticeable problem.

It’s quite windy today‒which is rather pleasant‒and there was a bit of rain on and off while I walked, though it’s really been negligible.  I got my umbrella out at one point, but even if I hadn’t used it, I don’t know that I would have gotten unpleasantly wet.

I decided last night to revisit the “mantra” notion I mentioned earlier this week, but with a slight downgrade or alteration from my previous idea to make it more workable.  If you’ll recall, I had started with the plan just to say “I love myself” as a form of auto-suggestion, then expanded it to “I love the world and I love myself”.  Anyway, I found that, upon awakening the next morning, I could not even make my mind’s voice speak the words.  They simply felt too utterly at odds with my thinking.

However, only one of those phrases was really the problem.  So, starting last night, I’ve tried to repeat to myself the mantra “I love the world” when I’m not otherwise engaged.  This seems to work much better.

I have a hard time even saying that I love myself, but the world…well, I’ve always loved nearly all branches of science, and they are all about understanding and exploring the world.  And I like mathematics and philosophy, and I even like history.

It can be easy to get discouraged by the way people behave at any given moment, and certainly humans say and do some ridiculous and destructive things.  But loving something doesn’t require it to be perfect.  In most cases, the concept of “perfect” isn’t even coherent.  Indeed, loving something can entail wanting to help it get better than it already is.  If you hate something (or someone) there’s no sense of trying to improve anything.  Wanting something (or someone) to improve is a positive, beneficent emotion.

To clarify, when I say “the world” in this context, I don’t just mean “the Earth”, I mean “the Universe”, to whatever level of multiverse and/or higher dimensionality might exist‒everything, all time, all possible stuff.  And let’s be honest, when you start thinking about things like that, while they can be daunting‒since, compared to infinities, anything finite is vanishingly small‒they’re still just mind-blowingly cool.  Don’t even get me started on the uncountable infinities of the “real” numbers and “complex numbers” and functions that are discontinuous at every point**, or infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces!

So, anyway, when I woke up this morning, I was easily able to start thinking “I love the world” to myself, and that was a pleasant surprise.  Hopefully, I can keep it up.  At the very least, it would help make other things easier to tolerate, even if it doesn’t help me like myself.

Would that be a peculiar kind of dualism?  Possibly, but it’s not a formal distinction of type or substance; it would just leave me as an exception to a general tendency.

Anyway, that’s about it for now.  My coworker who had a stroke is apparently stable, and no clot was discovered, so I’m still puzzled, but I don’t have much information.  Hopefully we’ll find out more soon.

And, hopefully, you all have a good Thursday.  Thank you for reading.

TTFN

urchins on kelp

*I keep accidentally writing “cook down” when I try to write “cool down”.  It’s not a nonsense phrase, but it probably never would apply to me.

**There’s a term for this, but I’m dipped if I can recall it‒something like “continuously discontinuous functions”*** but I don’t think that’s quite right.  I know next to nothing about the subject, but just the notion of a function that is non-differentiable at every point is astounding.

***Though I heard at least one mathematician refer to them as “infinitely kinky functions” in a tongue-in-cheek fashion.

by

Blogs without all remedy should be without regard

Hello and good morning to everyone who is reading this.

And to everyone who is not reading this‒well, nothing, really.  It doesn’t matter what I say to the people not reading this, because, until and unless they actually read this, there will be no way for them to know what I am “saying” to them.

I suppose it’s possible that someone might read this blog post out loud to someone else, in which case the listener can know what I’ve written without literally reading it.  But, if you can consider listening to an audiobook to be “reading” the book‒and you can, though you’re not required to do so‒then that would count very much as the same thing.

It’s a bit like, for instance, the wave-front of the wave equation of a photon that was released from the last scattering surface of the early cosmos, just as the universe became cool enough for electrons and nuclei to join together and stop being plasma.

Imagine such a photon’s wave function progressing through the expanding universe, on and on, its wavelength increasing with the expansion of spacetime, red shifting and red shifting and red shifting.  What if it never interacts with anything else in the cosmos?  What if it’s never absorbed or scattered or reflected, “measured” by nothing but spacetime itself, on into the heat death of the universe, until there’s no longer even anything within its cosmic horizon with which it can interact?  Its wavelength stretches and stretches, perhaps eventually becoming light years in size*.  At some point it’s going to be completely swamped and washed out by the random quantum oscillations of the universe, even if that universe is immeasurably close to absolute zero in temperature.

Imagine such a photon given off by that last scattering surface and then traveling for a trillion years, a googol years, then for so long that a googol years seems as vanishing as a microsecond, never interacting, perhaps, until some version of a Poincare recurrence of the universe happens.  In principle, it might not interact even then***.  In what deep sense can that photon be said to be “light”?

It might even count as some manner of “virtual” photon, though certainly not the kind that is usually meant when that term is used.  It might seem lonely and depressing to be that photon, but we can console ourselves with the fact that, as far as any sensible notion of reality appears, photons have no subjective experience*****.  Even the absurd notions of panpsychism don’t literally imagine that photons are individually, actually conscious, in the sense of having internal “qualia“.

So, if I write something that no one reads, then what I have written cannot matter to those who have not read it.  Of course, in principle, all measurable remnants of even Shakespeare’s writing will someday be read and/or uttered for the very last time, but that’s different‒they will already have interacted immeasurably often before then.  The outcome will be nothingness‒or as near to it as possible‒but in the meantime, much will have happened.

Of course, according to quantum mechanics, quantum information is conserved, so everything from Hamlet to my imagined stray, lonely photon would be, in principle, recoverable.  But that’s a very rarefied “in principle”.

So, for those of you reading this, you really don’t have to worry about what people who have never read nor will ever read it will think about it.  They simply won’t have read it.  Likewise, I don’t have to worry about the reaction to my writing from people who don’t read it.

And, of course, if people “react” without ever having read a thing, which certainly does happen, those opinions are not worth considering.  I don’t need to take thought for some criticism of the Mona Lisa by a person who has never seen even any manner of reproduction or image of the painting.

Nor should I worry about being offended by the chattering of a squirrel in a nearby tree, or the noise arising from leaves stirred by the wind.  It’s merely noise, not too different from those quantum jitters that happen even in a region of the universe that’s as close to absolute zero as it can be.  There is always noise‒though it can become vanishingly close to silence (which sounds quite nice, so to speak).

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  I had a long day of walking yesterday‒about 15 miles total distance, and my joints and muscles still feel pretty good, so the shoes are all right******.  I did not walk to the train this morning‒I figure just a bit of recovery time is warranted‒but I may walk this evening.  I hope you have a good day, and that all your metaphorical photons have lots of interesting and enjoyable interactions before they dissipate.

What more could you reasonably ask?

TTFN

Keds cartoon

*That seems an interesting possibility.  What does it mean for a photon to have a wavelength measured in light years**?  If one wavelength takes a year to pass, is it really even a wave anymore?

**Okay, one can literally measure any wavelength in light years if one is so inclined, but for ordinary wavelengths such as those of more usual light, on the scale of nanometers and such, it’s a bit absurd.  One might as well measure the energy output of an LED bulb in megatons of TNT per second.

***Though, if it arrives at another “Big Bang” coming from the other direction in time, as I speculate could be possible, then it’s hard to see it approaching a state of new, lowering entropy from an impending region of inflation and another “last scattering surface” without actually scattering off the dense plasma‒and then our photon would end as it had begun, a quantum event going from the remnant of one Big Bang to another, countless years “later”****

****Though the notion of “later” might be irrelevant, since the directionality of time is determined by the direction of increasing entropy, and that would be inconsistent and reverse itself in my conjectured scenario.  It’s a bit like floating in intergalactic space and saying one is trying to go “higher”.  You can say it if you want, but it’s not really apposite‒it may even be the opposite of apposite.  Higher from one point of view becomes lower from another, even if one is traveling from planet to planet within a solar system.  Likewise for “later” and “earlier” when moving from one inflating region to another…if such a thing can happen, of course.

*****And they also don’t “experience” any passage of time internally…from the point of view of a photon, so to speak, it starts and ends instantaneously.

******That makes me wish I were wearing Keds, so I could honestly say. “The Keds are alright.”