Mary's Room Part I

"Mary's Room" is a thought experiment designed to show the limitations of physicalism and the inability of any theory based on physicalism to adequately describe subjective experiences known as qualia. The experiment goes as follows: A woman named Mary is locked in a completely monochromatic room where anything visible to her is only visible in black and white. She spends her entire life studying optics and electromagnetic theory until she knows all there is to know about light. The argument then is, if she knows all there is to know about light, does she know what the colour red looks like? If she knows all there is to know about light, then surely she should not be shocked when she is released from her room into the full colour world the physicalist argument would espouse. But what Frank Jackson put forward (the man who conceived the experiment) is that despite all her hard work learning about every aspect there is to know about light, no matter how much factual knowledge she accumulates, she cannot capture what it is to experience the colour red, and should therefore be in awe at seeing it for the first time. In summary, no matter how much she learns she can never factually know the sensation of redness, or any number of subjective experiences, and thus physicalism is incomplete. My rebuttal of this view is as follows: Although she has learned as much as she can about light, one crucial piece is missing, and that is a complete knowledge of neuroscience. Lets instead imagine that we give Mary a little bit more time in her tucked away room before we release her and she teaches herself all about neuroscience as well. She learns that as light enters the eye it elicits various nerve impulses depending on a variety of factors. In our case we'll focus solely on colour perception. Mary finds that when the wavelength of light commonly referred to as red is detected, it sparks action in a set of particular neurones. Mary proceeds to build a device capable of stimulating those neurones in her own brain and for the first time beholds the colour red! Mary concludes then that "redness" can be identified as a collection of information that when processed by the brain in sum leads to the sensation of red. The Mary's Room argument in an attempt to show the incompleteness of physicalism, I believe demonstrates that it itself is not complete because it leaves out the very crucial physical process that the observer herself must complete to fulfill the experience. Thus the experience itself remains firmly within the physical realm.

Beyond Science

There are many ways people try to divine the "truth" from the world. This will open a can of worms but the scientific method seems to take the cake in the dishing out of accurate facts. What I'm interested in briefly talking about though is what the dichotomy between acceptable methods before science, and then after it's actualisation were, and inevitably how that may reflect on the future. It can be argued that the elements of what would eventually become the scientific method existed prior to their collection and labelling as a whole as science. Apart though, the array of philosophies weren't nearly as effective as they are used in tandem (falsifiability, empiricism, objectivity, etc.). Nobody anticipated the future existence of the scientific method. There wasn't a person saying, "wouldn't it be great if we had science, and this is how it should work". It's creation in itself was a process spanning many years and careers. Now comes the thought experiment. Is science as good a method as we can get? Or could a superior system yet be in the making? Ironically it will probably be science itself that leads us to it. I invite any readers to throw down some ideas in the comment section on ways that you think could improve any piece of the scientific method, or perhaps augment it to improve any of it's aspects. In this case we are all just speculating and no better off than my hypothetical dreamer from earlier on. But I find it fascinating to imagine the possibility of something just as revolutionary as the scientific method was in it's time, happening again in the future, and how it would expand the horizons on the limits of knowledge and what is knowable. This discussion is also in no way meant to knock science in anyway. I have the utmost respect for it and all of the amazing knowledge and advancement it has brought humanity. I realise I haven't added much to the conversation. This is an area I haven't really explored. I'm more looking to incite brainstorming, or even just spark an interesting idea.

Deer John

Deer John is a very odd, original, and awesome idea my friend Pelle and I came up with as we are wont to do. The story centres around a man named John Doe who lives in a small city in England. He works an average life and spends the average amount of time one spends at the local pub when having no significant personal relationships. He spends so much time in fact at the pub that he even receives his mail there. His mother was gunned down when he was young lad, and he therefore keeps her mounted head upon the wall in his very small flat. Sadly, he never met his father. I should mention he has the head of a deer. And his mother was a deer. He still never knew his dad though. Deer John thusly chronicles the sad and at times lonely life of John Doe, and his office associates Thom Perlapin, Fleure Blackguard, and the beautiful and much out of his league, supervisor Brenda Faline. As John begins to delve into his foggy past, things grow very strange indeed. With all signs pointing towards a very important figure in John's life, and the very company he works for...

Holy Robots!

When the day comes that machines achieve a form of self awareness at least equal to, if not greater than our own, might they have religious tendencies of their own? I am personally a non-religious fellow, but in a very narrow example, could machines see themselves as God's true children? If we build these machines in our own likeness, surely this type of behaviour is not out of the realm of possibility. In most, if not all respects both mentally and physically, they have every probability of exceeding us (physically they do, and in a few specific arenas they far outcompete humans already). Designing themselves into aesthetically idealised forms (identifying with Christianity I can assume a model human form) would be essentially effortless, and they would be free of any "sins of the flesh". Most importantly though, as I stated earlier, by creating these machines in our image, just as we are made in God's, by the transit of property they too are made in God's image, with the exception of being vastly superior to a flesh and blood human. If they do see themselves in such a light, I can imagine them believing themselves to be "humanity's" next ultimate step towards becoming the form of humanity that existed prior to "The Fall", and inevitable in God's plan. This is an idea I would like to flesh out in greater detail in a future post. Any discussion, be it rebuttals, additions, criticisms, etc. are all welcomed! For additional reading regarding possible future Human/Machine relations, and the possibility of top down control (even within the machine community with the most intellectually advanced at the top) I invite you to read about the AI-box experiment, which I believe has strong implications relating to this blog post. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment

Perpenormal...

A sillier than your average post kinda post. Everyone goes about their days thinking everything is normal. But every now and again something eerie happens. Something unexplainable. This next tier of normal lies "just above" or "parallel to" regular normality, and is therefore called "para-normal". Now say something even more insanely weird happens? Something so utterly inexplicable that your brain should explode, but it doesn't, because things are THAT weird. I like to call this experience "perpenormal". Using the geometric relation above, this type of strangeness is so wild it runs perpendicular to all other forms of normal. Rudely intersecting your perfectly average day!

The Whole World In The Sky

My girlfriend and I live in a place where lots of stars are visible in the night sky. The other evening we were laying on our backs looking up at the night sky and I thought it would be neat if rather than Earth being a globe floating in the vastness of space, it was a globe of space floating through a vast "Earthiness". I felt like I was hovering above, and at times even falling towards the giant space mass. Like stationary sky diving. After revelling in the moment for a bit, my girlfriend suggested that it would be really cool too if the stars were actually far away cities, a visual you would get if you lived on the interior surface of a hollow, earth sized globe. The idea really stuck with me because I felt like the visual of it was so powerful and interesting. Now almost every time I look at the night sky I envisage those cities, and how even something so natural and taken for granted, can still be viewed in an entirely new ways if you just take the time to look, and step outside the box even just a little bit. If anybody reading this has decent night sky viewing I highly recommend, even if just for a moment or two, for you to go outside, lay back, and imagine different ways of interpreting the stars, clouds, and everything out.

Sideways Through Time

We always travel forwards in time, and the idea of travelling backwards is out there. What about sideways though? If time were two dimensional and you could build a sideways time machine, what would it be like? If this were the case I like to imagine time as a kind of water drop along the glass wall of a shower. As the drop drips down the glass it creates a path behind it in the condensation which would be it's history, and the drop itself is the present. The gravity acting on to bring the drop lower and lower could be analogous to the entropy that drives time forward. Now, I build my machine, hop inside, and flip the switch. As the machine travels sideways my view from the inside would rapidly change from my present time in my universe, to the what the present looks like in the next nearest branch at my location, and so on as I continue further and further. Just like a time lapse video. I also like to think that perhaps as I stated earlier, the entropy would act as a gravitational force, drawing all time streams down. So to reach another time stream location exactly perpendicular to you, you would need to travel in a parabolic shape, like when playing catch with someone, and the further you travel away from your time stream, the more different things would become. In summary, As you travel sideways you travel to other temporal branches of your universe. The further away from your stream you travel, the more different things become. Depending on then location among the various streams you plan to travel to, you need to change your temporal angle to accommodate the entropic gravitation drawing all things toward the future. Finally, the fastest you can fall straight down temporally, is the speed of light (any faster and you would start crawling back up, since you would be going backward through time).