Grounds for the Equivalence of Nothing and Something

Recent exploration both virtual and mental has left me pondering relationships between the idea of nothing, and something. Nothing tends to be a bit of a loaded term in and of itself. It can be used to describe the lack of a specific something, a vacuum (which in almost all cases is not a complete lack of everything), the absolute absence of everything, and can even become a thing itself (as in a hole). I would like to attempt at describing a connection between the definition of nothing as an absolute absence of anything, its vacuum definition, and the existence of a something (be it an entire universe, a single photon, or anything else you could imagine). To my mind, it is not inconceivable that there are many ways to have both nothing and something at the same time, and is in fact, the likeliest scenario. By this, I mean that it is much more likely to have a collection of things that together sum to nothing, rather than just a pure and eternal nothingness.

Using numbers as an example, there is only one number that defines absolute nothingness, and as you've already guessed it's zero. Out of the infinite scheme of numbers there is only one zero, and yet, there is an infinite number of other ways to get zero.

1+(-1)=0

(-1)+3+(-2)=0

3*(-3)+9=0

You get the idea...

You can have as many somethings as you want, and they will sum to a perfect nothing as long as there is enough of a counter something. Something and counter something need not necessarily even exist at the same time, as long as the average is equivalent to nothing having existed. You could have:

At T1 Nothing

At T2 Something

At T3 Nothing

At T4 Counter Something

This is very simplified and need not be so black and white, but it gets the point across. You could even get the same result by removing both T1, and T3.

In conclusion, I'm stating that it's much more natural that the world exists in the delicate and ambiguous state of being both something and absolutely nothing at the same time because there are many more ways for it to do so, and is therefore much easier than maintaining, or even attaining to begin with, a perfect state of absolute nothingness.

A something from nothing isn't so improbable. It's probably the status quo.

Television Analogy of the Mind

As you may have seen in prior posts, I'm firmly rooted in a physicalist, reductionist view on things. When it comes to consciousness, or the workings of a mind in general (not just human), I see it's source as a collection of immensely intricate interactions among neurones, brain chemicals, external (environmental and experiential), and internal (amount of sleep, what you ate, levels of various hormones, etc.) states.
A useful if not overly simplistic analogy I have come up with to describe my view of apparent conscious behaviour I call the TV Analogy. I liken the pixels of a TV screen to the firing of neurones, and the input cable as external stimuli. As the TV receives information from the input cable, the state of it's pixels is changed thereby creating an overall change in what appears on the TV from the point of an outside observer. As this continually happens, we are given the illusion of motion and 'livelihood' to what is displayed.
I find this mirrors well (again, enormously oversimplified), with the action of the brain and its effect on apparent behaviour. As new external stimuli is received, the state of the brain is changed at the neuronal level, thereby changing the internal mental state and behaviour of the being. The sensory nerves and organs of the body act like the input cable, and the neurones and ultimate behaviour that they cause, can be equated with the TV display.

Bird Watching: A Guide to Geordie Girls

I occasionally watch the show 'Geordie Shore' with my girlfriend. If you haven't seen it it's Jersey Shore for the British. At times much of what they say is fairly unintelligible because of heavy slang and accent. What really got me thinking is their slang for girls. When they go out on the town for a night of binge drinking, vaguely rhythmic moving, and drama inducing belligerence, the main goal of the 'Lads' is always to 'pull birds'. At first I thought that it wasn't so different to being called 'chicks'. I was clearly overlooking the chance for something far greater though. There is a plethora of books on the market today that are on ridiculous subject matter but very entertaining, and excellent novelty items. So, I thought to myself, why not a book with the clever title 'Bird Watching: A Guide to Geordie Girls'. All it would be is a collection of pictures of Newcastle and Tyneside women enjoying the night life, their signatures, and maybe a blurb about what they enjoy best about the local nightlife. Throw in a couple glamour shots at some notable locations and you've got yourself a book! I'd love to hear people's reactions to this, especially as a UK or particularly a Geordie native if you happen across this.

Happy Pi Day!

It's that mathematical time of year yet again! 3.14.13 (We'll be slightly more accurate in 2015). To celebrate, here is a delicious video of the guys at Numberphile calculating Pi using only real pies! And a corny joke... Pi r not squared, Pie are round! lolololol yeah....

Perdurantism

About a year back I was daydreaming and began pondering identity. Looking back at the person I was as a child, or even as a teenager relative to who I am now, I can surely say that although I retain some behavioural traits I am overall a different person. I started framing the question to myself from the perspective of an animated character. In classical animation, a character is drawn and redrawn multiple times per second to give the illusion of motion. Putting myself in the animated character's shoes, I then imagined each new frame (drawing of the character at a different location in time) as a new identity, or a related but new conscious entity. From each frame's perspective, it is, has always been, and always will be the being inhabiting it's particular physical form. The reason it should believe this is because it has access to information from the past that has all happened revolving around the body's location in space, and it currently inhabits that same form. Just as each animated character at each frame in time believes it has always inhabited the body it calls home, for the simple reason that it has access to information from that body's past, so too do people. As I was saying before, I'm not the same person I was as a young child. I believe the physical state of the brain that made up that conscious identity no longer exists and is therefore, dead. I only believe that that identity was me because I can remember events that happened to it, from it's perspective in space. The same will be true in the future. The man i am now will slowly fade into the man I will become and what I am today will cease to exist. But whatever comes next will have all the knowledge available to it, and inhabit the same point in space as I once did, and thus will believe that it and I are the same thing. The view I'm taking as I later found out, is a sub-group of Perdurntism known as Exdurantism (Stage Theorists). Exdurantism claims that things exist only in temporally discrete parts. A quick quote from wikipedia to clarify

Stage theorists take you to be identical with a particular temporal part at any given time. So, in a manner of speaking, a subject only exists for an instantaneous period of time. However there are other temporal parts at other times which that subject is related to in a certain way (Sider talks of 'modal counterpart relations', whilst Hawley talks of 'non-Humean relations') such that when someone says that they were a child, or that they will be an elderly person, these things are true, because they bear a special "identity-like" relation to a temporal part that is a child (that exists in the past) or a temporal part that is an elderly person(that exists in the future). Stage theorists are sometimes called 'exdurantists'.

This seemed to be a particularly hard post to articulate, but I hope I have gotten across the gist of the idea I'm trying to portray.

Colour Perception II

The notion that we all see the colours in the same way seems obvious. What i perceive as green is identical to what you perceive as green. But how can we know for sure? An interesting video that discusses this topic can be located below by vsauce on youtube. To perhaps shed light on the subject, I suggest an experiment. My hypothesis is that colour vision evolved to help our ancestors identify food primarily. If this is the case, then the colours as we perceive them should be optimised to making things like fruit stand out against foliage or other various environments. To start, we could have our control image be a normal picture with unchanged colours be presented to a series of subjects. They would then have to identify as many potential food sources as possible. Next, the image could be adjusted so that all colours are rotated by the same amount around the colour wheel in the same direction by x, preserving the relative locations of each colour to each other colour contained in the image. This would be repeated multiple times and various subjects would repeatedly attempt to identify potential food sources. I believe the results would show that the optimum capability for finding food would hover very near the colours as they appear in the control image. The conclusion that could be drawn is that evolution has whittled down those who did not sense colour in the way the majority does because it is not as effective. This could be backed up by brain scans of people who would be shown colours in an MRI machine. If the scans matched significantly, it would show the same perceptual process is being undertaken by each individual. In summary, the reason my red is the same as your red, as well as our greens and all others being the same is because this maximises contrast between food and non-food, whereas people who aren't able to perceive colour like you or me where less effective at finding the necessary food. Vsauce Colour Perception Video

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.