I am normal

Surely we are very suspicious of anyone claiming to be ‘normal’. Appeal to our desire to seem normal is meant to be persuasive: ‘Put your litter in the bin – others do’. But we are also cajoled by advertisers to be different ‘Stand out from the crowd – buy a car.’

R. D. Lang pointed out that “our normal, adjusted state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true personalities.”

Eccentrics can be self-centred bores or they can be imaginative geniuses. Take William Blake – you wouldn’t find him proudly displaying a sign saying he was normal.  

The chap in the picture is clearly odd, for a start he has over-sized hands, feet and bow-tie. Dressed in 18^th century garb, he must be a character from a movie – I don’t know which.  On the sole of his left foot it says ‘Made in China’.

Be reasonable

The little red rubber guy, his head filled with flour, pleads with us to be reasonable. He is worried. He wants us to be open to argument. He is hoping we are not fanatics of some irrational cult. He hopes we are not fascists, zealots, anarchists, bigots or surrealists. He hopes we are not fuelled by emotions as women are supposed to be.

When we are passionate, loyal, in love, mad, patriotic, poetic, intuitive, filled with hatred or remorse, our heart rules our head and we make irrational decisions. Sometimes those decisions turn out to be the same as the ones we would have made by applying rationality. Sometimes we rationalise intuitive decisions after we have made them. Sometimes we act without seeming to make a decision at all.

Neuroscience tells us that every thought we have has an emotional content. It’s impossible to add two numbers together without involving an emotional component. So perhaps the little red rubber guy is being unreasonable.

Life is improbable

It is very strange that anything exists. Surely it is much more likely that there should be nothing. And if something did exist you would expect it to be something very simple like a quark, or a string, or a dimensionless point, or an energy field. But a woman in a ball gown clutching a rose – that’s highly improbable. But then we make this observation from a privileged position – that of existing - however improbable we are, it seems we do exist.

What are we to make of this paradox? How did we get from nothing to something? And how did we get from simplicity to the world of roses, women, dancing and plastic models?

Did God sit around for aeons of time twiddling his thumbs in empty space, getting bored, then decided to give things a push and created a universe? No – space and time were made at the same er … time! There were no aeons before creation and no space to put the universe in. Did the first explosion of existence contain the instructions to make a plastic model of a woman in a ball gown, just like an acorn is programmed to make an oak tree?

Could anything be said to exist without an intelligence to perceive it? Imagine a universe with no living things. Imagine that life never arises in this dead universe. How would it know it existed? How would you know whether it really existed or not? Now imagine that you never imagined it in the first place. Where did it go?

Suppose time is not a sequence of events but an illusion. All past events happen ‘at once’. Suppose we - the intelligence of the universe - are pulling events from the future.  Suppose God did not push – we pulled!

Here be dragons

Let’s begin with Borges’ metaphor of the cartographers who made more  and  more accurate maps of the world until their map became as big as the world it was mapping, and finally, identical with it.

We perceive the world by making a map or model of it. At each glance we receive only a tiny bit if information. We coordinate these many tiny bits to make a meaningful pattern which we are constantly adjusting. This is our internal map of the world which we build from sensory, cultural and linguistic information.

We each have a world inside our heads (WIOH) created in this way made of language, maps, stories, diagrams, metaphors, mathematics and heaven knows what.

The WIOH becomes more sophisticated as our culture and communication develop and it becomes a more and more reliable guide to the real world out there (RWOT). We can make accurate predictions about how the RWOT will behave. We can make cunning devices based on our sophisticated maps. But the RWOH must always be bigger and more comprehensive than the WIOH – which is only a map after all. The RWOT must contain the WIOH.

But what if our mapping and calculations became so sophisticated that they reveal a mathematical principal which transcends the RWOT, a principal which suggest that the RWOT is just a part of an even greater reality, which predicts the existence of other real worlds. Then our map becomes bigger than the real world. In an incredible feat of space-warping, like a hollow rubber ball suddenly flipping inside-out, the real world suddenly lies inside our heads.

This super-map is the territory of the theory of Multiverses. Will it prove to be a useful map or is it the equivalent of scribbling “Here be dragons”on unknown territory?

Life on Kepler-186f

So we have discovered an Earth-like planet 500 light-years away and Andrew Snyder-Beattie thinks if we found intelligent life on it, it would be bad news for humanity.
http://theconversation.com/habitable-exoplanets-are-bad-news-for-humanity-25838

I think the argument goes like this:
1) If there is intelligent life on many other planets we should have heard from some of them by now (the Fermi Paradox) so either life is a very rare (or even unique) occurrence - or when it does occur it doesn't last long enough to communicate with us.
2) Assuming life is not a rare occurrence then it must frequently become extinct at some point before evolving to a level with an ability (or desire) to communicate with other planets. When that extinction most often happens is crucial.
3) Any civilisation which produces the technology for communication with other planets would also be likely produce the technology for its own destruction.
4) If the extinction most often happens before the evolution if intelligent lifeforms then we can't expect to find many other planets with intelligent life.
5) If the extinction happens after the evolution of intelligent life then it may be as a consequence of that intelligence (e.g. in developing suicidal technologies).
6) So if we find intelligent life on Kepler-186f* or other habitable planets, this suggests 5) is more likely than 4) in other words it's bad news for us since if we follow the path of the rest of the universe we are likely to ultimately destroy ourselves.

* or rather that there was 500 years ago.

If a tree falls ...

Suppose a tree falls in the woods and nobody sees it fall. Has it really fallen?

Or suppose someone does see it fall but they drop dead before they can tell anyone about it.
Or suppose they don't drop dead straight away but they don't bother to tell anyone about it and they die many years later.
Or suppose they write about it in a secret diary which is later destroyed in a fire.
Or suppose the diary is not destroyed, but is never discovered.
Or suppose it is discovered many years later and nobody can decipher the writing.
Or suppose the writing is deciphered and celebrated as a holy text by a whole culture for many generations. But the culture is destroyed by a cataclysmic event which leaves to trace of it ever having existed.

When the Sun becomes a red dwarf and there are no humans left in the universe, will it all amount to nothing?

There was no flower until there was an eye to see it

"There was no flower until there was an eye to see it"

Charles Darwin

Or you could say 'There was no universe until there was a mind to perceive it' - or perhaps until there was a culture to understand it.
There were no dinosaurs until there was a science to understand them.
There were no atoms until we invented them.
There was no matter until we defined it into existence.

We created God and God created us.
The universe is sustained by our consciousness and creativity.

We are stardust.
We are the sons and daughters of the universe - we are of it and it is of us.
As the alchemists said "as above, so below"