Peter Burns & the Jelly

 PB&J is the story of one young Peter Burns. Peter Burns, all of twelve years old, goes for a pleasant ocean swim one day with his close friends. Whilst partaking in frolics and the delights of the magnificent sea, a jellyfish did undulate his way, as they are wont to do. Neither grasped the consequences of this chance meeting. Just as they engaged in a caustic handshake of sorts the two were freaky fridayed by some errant wifi waves seeking a home.
 Peter Burns, once average boy, is now a genius among his new Jellyfish brethren, while the former jelly inhabitant struggles to control even the most basic functions of it's new found body. As Peter Burns now finds himself with all the time in the world, he reflects on his life, deep meaningful questions of existence, and continually invents and tests harebrained ways to attempt retrieving his body! Meanwhile, his friends do they're best to minimise the multiple ways the Jelly ignorantly threatens Peter Burns' social life and physical well being.

Ecology of Ideas

 We are currently living in a time that is unprecedented in the creation, sharing, and access to ideas. New ideas are constantly being produced by both individuals and groups alike. Some serve a purpose, others are dreams or fantasies, many are retoolings of old ideas in a fresh way, and more still are created just for the sake of existing. To me, I feel the era we are going through can be likened to a "Cambrian Explosion" of ideas. During the Cambrian Explosion in Earth's history life erupted into an unimaginable number of complex creatures which, over time and refining laid the foundation for the major domains and kingdoms of life, as well as early structures of modern ecosystems.
  This is directly relatable to the current trend we're seeing in the proliferation and rapid evolution of ideas right now. We've crossed a threshold wherein the complexity and diversity of ideas has increased dramatically along with their sheer volume. I would say we are in the process of creating an ecosystem where ideas compete for resources such as popularity, and create dynamic systems by interacting much like actual life forms. It will be interesting to see what the future holds. Will the growth go on unchecked? Or, will certain strings of ideas prove to dominate the landscape creating an interdependent system just like modern ecosystems found in nature?

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.