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"

Who created whom?

A

At the end of this sentence I will type the letter A.
This time, I will not type the letter A when I get to the end of this sentence, I will copy the first A and paste it in here: A.
Now I will use the same A again - it's still on the clipboard so I will paste it here: A.
At the end of this sentence I will type the letter A.
That last sentence was actually copied from the first sentence and pasted in above, so it's not true to say that I typed the letter A that time. So the sentence above is false, but the first sentence was true. The two sentences contain the same words but one is true and the other is false.

Some things

Some things we think of as alive are actually dead. Ghosts hiding in the crowd and passing themselves off as living humans or animals.

Conversely, some things we think are inanimate are in fact possessed of life. Some rocks, some mountains, the wind sometimes.