A Dream

Last night I had a dream where people would attempt at travel to other planets.  They would shrink themselves down to smaller sizes and get into these egg shaped pods around the size of something you can hold in your hand, a little smaller then a football.  These pods were made out of some amorphous living plasma, translucent from the outside and transparent from the inside.  These pods were then flung into space using very powerful catapults.  The catapults were made out of long, spring-like, carbon rods that extended into the atmosphere; they were brought down to earth and then released and the force was great enough to eject the pods with escape velocity fast enough to leave the earths gravitational pull.  Not only that but inexplicably start accelerating past that to close to the speed of light, in which the humans inside would survive the journey to other planets that contained water and were similar to earth; they would survive this journey due to the effects of time dilation and the journey would only feel like a few years.  Once they got close to the planet the size of the pod and human would somehow enlarge and return to normal human size with a comparably size pod, then the outer layers of the pod would burn up during entry into the atmosphere of the new planet. And the human would emerge on the ground of the new planet.

Now that the technical details of the story are done there was also a plot involved, one that was very convoluted and I am still trying to make sense of.  Dreams have a strange way of being inexplicable, some details are perfectly explained and some are just glossed over like someone said “that’s how it is”.  On to the plot:

I was on vacation and we decided to go to Disney World and Epcot center, while I was at Epcot there was a new space exploration exhibit. I was intrigued and had to go see what it was about.  This one was different then normal exhibits in that they actually, Launched You into Space! Taken aback by this I was completely unprepared.  As I was intrigued by the idea of getting launched into space, I had not prepared to leave planet earth indefinitely (I was on a two week vacation), so I had to decline leaving. Although I stood by and watched humans getting flung into space.  Two of my fellow group members whom I had just met on vacation decided to go for it.  As they were getting launched the carbon rods that they were getting launched from were not that high only approximately 20 feet tall.  They got shrunk down put into pods and were launched.  As they started leaving earths atmosphere and started experiencing weightlessness they were pulled back down by gravity and started screaming because they were falling and didn’t know what was going on.  Their pod expanded, burned up and they returned to normal size.  After they had landed it was explained to them that they hadn’t signed up to travel to other planets just for a space ride.  However their experience was informative because now they scientists knew the human shrinking process could be reversed.

After that the story goes to this other person that was unscrupulous in the way he obtained a trip to another planet, he was making the journey alone and he would be the only intelligent creature on the new planet and he could do what he pleased there.  Other planets a group of people in pods would go to colonize.  On this long journey he would survive by consuming a liquid that had extremely high protein count and oil which has extremely high calorie and energy count.  Although it was not described how waste would be removed from the pod (if there was any? maybe it would help power the pod through space?).

After that story arc was over the story then shifted again to an even more unscrupulous person left on earth that was glad he was getting all of these people off of the planet, because that was his original intention; to reduce the population, carbon dioxide levels, and global warming all at once.  While sending a third of the population into space under false pretenses of space exploration; he was left to rule over the planet as he saw fit.

At this point my alarm went off and I woke up. Pretty anti-climactic.  I would like to think that someone got wind of this plan and overthrew him but I will never know.  Or the story could be left with a bad ending.  I leave this up to the reader to ponder.

Questions on being human

How is it that a human, the most powerful biological computer, is able to reproduce and have its offspring learn and be a conscious being without understanding how every step happens. The amount of perceived power is enormous. the amount of kilojoules of energy tremendous to allow this to happen.  if every human child that is born is able to understand the workings of general relativity, quantum mechanics, theoretical string theory, and any other of the million things that human beings can know about or do the amount of energy is astonishing. this cannot seem to be measured in joules or watts on similar to a computer energy scale this must be measured on a human scale. and humans being able to wield such enormous amounts of power must be able to convert energy into a constituent that is able to describe itself. in short: humans and the intelligent computers that follow them are a consequence of matter describing itself and making itself known, all that was a quantum mechanical phenomenon that might not have occurred and was a chance coincidence, results in space, matter, and time given itself meaning by allowing consciousness to occur, the result of which are electromagnetic waves that will travel throughout space onto infinity always oscillating betwe1en a magnetic and electrical wave proving to itself to have existed and have had meaning at least at one time, if not further on into the future or alternate dimensions of reality or a plane of existence that the most powerful brain cannot yet comprehend.
As I write this I think of how words do not do a very good job of describing this and that thoughts will be the ultimate form of communication so that others can know of how I understand the universe and existence and how I agree with them if they have come to a similar conclusion.

Fate of the Uncertainty Principal

One of the problems I have with Quantum Superposition is the incongruence with fate. Fate is a philosophical construct and Quantum Superposition is a scientific theory which can be held up to experimentation. I can imagine some saying “that’s like comparing apples to chairs, they have nothing to do with each other”, I however would argue you can eat an apple while sitting in a chair, much to the same similarity that Quantum Superposition has with fate; the observer knows what happened in the past so it seems like fate but is uncertain what will happen in the future which is also similar to fate.

The first step in trying to control your future is to set up a situation in which “C” is the only outcome of “A” plus “B”. In most cases one can set this situation up. In the case where something is left to chance one can predict the probability that something will turn out one way or the other. But one is still unsure because it is just a prediction.

Take Schrödinger’s Cat for example, because the state of the cat is unknown, the information about the cat is a superposition of both being alive and dead at the same time. Then once observed, the uncertainty drops out and there is only one solution to the question. The mere fact of observation gives us information that did not exist previously, this allows us to turn observation into recorded history and when individual histories are strung together a history of causality can be determined by a person’s understanding. This might seem like the most logical conclusion that A affected B, which in turn affected C; but only taken as a system do these events happen together. When examined individually each event can stand as independent, and the probability of the next step is unchanged by the probability of all of the previous steps (if all of the probabilities started out as equal).

One problem with this model is co-dependence, whereas one variable or a group of variables affects the outcome of the next and so on until all of the remaining outcomes are known given the many iterations of this process. One would think that this process would allow everything to be known about a situation. Including the speed and location of particles themselves, but this is where the Uncertainty Principal comes into affect.

If one could add up all of the uncertainty that the Uncertainty Principal states should be there about every particle affecting a future situation, then we would still be stuck with a system in which we can predict what might happen, but we will not know what will happen. As in Schrödinger’s Cat, quantum fluctuations can affect real world macroscopic events and objects. This leads to the view that anything that we can directly control we know exactly how it will turn out but there are also some things that are left up to chance which we have no control over. The combination of these two things can define fate. Our history seems to be fated because a string of events can be traced back but it is a construct that only exists in our knowledge of the situation. In essence fate is the history of the situation, which leads me to this paradoxical statement.

History is fated and the future is not.

Evolution

After the theory of evolution and natural selection were created and studied for a number of years scientists came to realize that natural selection must occur in species but it can not predict the future. Meaning, natural selection is not going anywhere and it is not trying to make the perfect being, it is just trying to select the best features that allows survival in the wild.

That is natural selection, what about artificial selection? Can artificial selection attempt to predict the future and in so doing change natural selection into a construct that can attempt to plan for the future? (by selecting the best traits for now and later).

The classic view of artificial selection views it separate by humans selecting, I however consider it is the progression of natural selection and that it is still part of the same overlying theory. Nature is still doing the selecting and humans are still living in the wild (this wild looks a lot less wild then previously thought however). The same would hold true for species outside of this planet and for machines that are able to reproduce (currently we have not encountered any).

Questions that have arrived in my mind about this current process include: Do other sentient beings think in the same way? Will machines ever be able to think in the same way? Do animals think in the same way and have sentience?

The only answers I have to these questions are humans can tell that other humans carry on the same thought processes as themselves just by observing others using their five senses (plus outputs of speaking, drawing, and body language). It would be the same case in any being or object that a person would encounter.

The only thing that will most probably remove all doubt is if one were able to transfer thoughts. This would make a thought a tangible object, something measurable. This measurable “thought object” could be compared to ones own thoughts and in that comparison an understanding would take place that the two individuals are thinking about the same thing. I would like to consider that humans will one day be able to hold and comprehend more then just their own thoughts inside their brain(s).

Thought and the mind

Some think that thought is something that is indescribable, that it exists outside of the brain.  That it is not able to be defined or that we have no way of understanding it.  And to that line of reasoning, that it is only of metaphysical significance and cannot be compared with real matter or values.

I however consider that the mind solely exists in the brain and it is made up of the same matter as everything else.  The only thing that differs is the structure and organization of that matter, which gives us consciousness and allows us to think and question the very nature of our own consciousness.

Science has allowed us to dissect the brain and discover its subcomponents. The brain is made of neurons in which some way of firing allows conscious thought.  If those components are further sub-divided then there are molecules, then ions and atoms which allow electrical potentials.  Humans have been able to further subdivide these atoms into smaller particles.  These particles when arranged differently can be called other objects and have other functions.  With this line of reasoning the brain is essentially an electronic device using living neurons instead of other matter usually made up of silicon, copper, gold, etc.

Once the structure and function is known on an atomic level, a model and theory of thought can be made that can be held up to experiments.