Who created whom?

The World Inside Our Heads and the Real World Out There

The WIOH is made of stories using language, thoughts, mathematics, maps and models. As we become more sophisticated, it is the World we live in most of the time. We think the WIOH is the RWOT but it isn't - it's more like a sort of map.  As our knowledge advances, the WIOH expands - the map explains more about the RWOT in a way we can understand. Will it ever match the RWOT - Like the maps made by Borges' cartographers which grew bigger and bigger until they became as big as the real world?
The RWOT on the other hand just IS. It is indivisible, it does not contain 'things' or phenomena - these are all made up in the WIOH. It just IS.

When is now?

When we look at a scene, we are constructing an understanding of what we see from past experience (is that a tree on the horizon or a pylon?). We can’t look in two directions at once, we have to take time to construct the picture (we look over here, then over there – even if we don’t move our head, our eyes scan the scene).

Yet we perceive this as experiencing the landscape in ‘the present’. This is sometimes called the ‘spurious present’ – “the interval of time such that events occurring within it are experienced as present”. This is by contrast to the ‘real present’ which is supposed to be dimensionless.

In the diagram, the point at which the two cones meet (at the observer) is supposed to represent the real (objective, dimensionless) present.

Spot the difference

In an infinite set of things, some will be what Turing called ‘arbitrarily close’ – in other words indistinguishable. How many will depend on our accuracy of observation.

To test this for yourself, see how many differences you can spot in the drawing below.

This, That and The Other

I am This. When I look out at the world, I see That. That is the world I try to understand. Sometimes I try to look in at myself, I try to understand This.
To me, you are The Other, you are a special part of That which I assume is like me. Of course, you see yourself as 'This' and to you, I am 'The Other'. But we both share an experience of That.

The interface between This and That is my skin. Perhaps the self does not lie inside or outside this membrane but in the membrane itself - just like the present exists in the membrane between past and future.

Who created God?

It is my belief that we created the idea of God, just as we have created other useful concepts like Energy, Matter, Time and Space.
Is it possible that we created God AND God created us?

Duration and size

This graph plots Duration (the length of time for which something lasts) against its size (Volume). The axes are both approximate logarithmic scales (with a few gaps so I could squeeze everything in). The arrows show how some things change in size over their lifetime. I could not think of many things which get smaller, but put in the polar ice caps as an example.

A zen koan

A koan is a kind of linguistic puzzle set by zen masters to subvert the logical thought process and provoke a state of confusion which can give rise to enlightenment. (a famous example is 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?')


This koan is called 'Not Wind, Not Flag'.
Q. 'See the flag blowing in the wind - what is it that moves?'
A1. 'The flag?' - 'No - the flag is what is moved.'
A2. 'The wind?' - 'No the wind simply moves the flag.'
A3. (supposedly the correct answer.) 'Not wind and not flag.' 

Some of the confusion arrises because Wind and Flag are different kinds of concepts. Even more confusion arrises because 'moves' has two meanings: as a cause of movement and as the movement itself.
In the Venn diagrams, Not flag includes Wind, and Not wind includes Flag of course.
Are you confused or enlightened? (or both).

Duration and size

This graph plots Duration (how long something exists) against Volume (size). The axes are both log scales with quite a few gaps to accommodate the biggest things. 
The arrows show things which change in size during their lifetimes. I could not think of many things which decrease in size, but added the polar ice caps as an example.

The unknowable

Since the speed of light is constant, there is a limit to how much of the universe we can ever see or explore. Beyond this limit, everything is unknowable. Does it make any sense to ask what could be in this unknowable region? Is what we could know of the universe simply a definition of the universe? Does God know the unknowable bit?

Listen to the birds

Perception of time

It is a common observation that our perception of time changes as we get older (and bigger). I have tried to show this in the graph. Time is plotted on a log scale against height in metres.

Here sizes below the time axis get smaller and smaller through the building-blocks of matter until we reach a size less than a quark. The vertical axis would have to extend a lot lower to include the theoretical sizes of loops according to string theory.

The future is plotted on a similar curious scale where we imagine what will happen about a second into the future.

We finally reach the limits of what is knowable.

On this logarithmic scale we can see our own lifespan and size in relation to the universe.

The universe has expanded to 10 to the power of 27 metres diameter in 14 bn years

You expanded from 0 to 2 metres in about 20 years.

Our sun began life as a cloud of gas 5 bn years ago and will end as a red giant in about 5 bn years’ time.

Your life will end in less than half a million hours.

These 3 timelines are on a log scale with the present in the middle. The Abrahamic religions (Islam, Christianity and Judaism) more or less agree that God is eternal and created the universe at a certain time. Buddhists and Hindus believe time to be cyclical. Most current science theories assume the universe has a beginning and an end.

Big ideas

I find it very hard to understand really big numbers relating to the cosmos or tiny sub-atomic particles. So I am trying to plot some big and small things on charts which start with the scale of a human being and go up to the scale of the universe.

Logarithmic scales

These are scales which stretch the axes of a graph to help show big and small things on the same axis. On a 'base 10' log scale each equal space represents 10 times the last one. So if the first division represents one unit, the second is 10 units, the next is 100 and so on. We soon reach huge numbers with lots of zeros.

To save writing lots of zeros, we can write 1000 as '10 with a little 3 after it' - the 3 tells us there are 3 zeros. So a million is '10 with a little 6 after it'. (Blogger won't let me write this properly).
Log scales don't have a zero-point, they just have smaller and smaller divisions. On some of my graphs I have ignored this!!

Cosmic charts

So I'm experimenting with drawing charts about us and the cosmos. Please let me have critical comments and suggestions so I can improve them (ie don't just say 'awesome').