Just Another Fish

I did promise a while back that I’d start talking about my ideas and stuff.

The trouble is that I’m not sure where to begin - I talked a lot of this stuff to death years ago, and while I think it all holds up as a very elegant and compelling edifice, it’s very hard to deconstruct and discuss. This is possibly because it involves a bundle of intuitive yet elusive concepts that I don’t really think about in a verbal sense; they’re somewhere between maths, logic and dynamic models. In other words, I feel it in my gut.

I imagine religious people would describe their faith in much the same way.

So… again, where to begin?

It’s probably best if rather that attempt an analysis straight away, I talk about what I believe and see what comes out. At this point, I do not know if I am writing for myself, my friends, or the hordes of surfers who visit this blog every day. In a way it’s kind of like the diary you secretly hope people will head and… ????? well, step 3 (profit!) is that somehow everything becomes OK in your life.

Sorry, this space is for metaphysics only. I’ll quit with the me-talk.

First off: do I believe in god? Well, no, clearly not… though I do have some sympathies with Spinoza’s Pantheism, wherein reality and god are one and the same thing. It’s the only thing that would make sense, though it obviously requires structural justification (why would reality be god-shaped?).

The questions that really interest me are: what is reality? What are minds? How do they relate to each other?

The third question is not as asinine as it seems. Clearly, minds are part of reality so youcould say that it’s a category error to even ask that. Not so. The reason being is basically the Weak Anthropic Principle - “conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist.” What we witness of reality is limited to those parts of it in which we can exist. If you were stubborn, you could argue that this is a facile truism but it alters things. Most people hold that time is a simple linear beast, mainly because they have never had a reason to consider otherwise. It’s common sense - there’s the past, the present, and the future and they form a continuous line.

Both relativity and quantum mechanics would argue otherwise. (There now begins a lengthy discussion of this)

We all know that space-time can be warped, that the speed of time depends on your viewpoint. Put simply, the faster you move in space, the slower you move in time. Photons, travelling at c, do not experience time at all. They are emitted, they are absorbed. Everything that happens inbetween is instantaneous. Different observers witnessing the same events can disagree on even such basic things as causality - does A happen before B? It depends where you stand.

Quantum theory describes a bizarre world of pure probability. Mostly, this does not work its way up to everyday reality - which is why it can go against all common sense. These probabilities interact with each other; combining, nullifying and diverging. At each time, any system exists in a constantly evolving superposition of states. Each one represents a possible outcome of an observation (in fact, the nature of these components - eigenstates - are determined by the type of question the observer is asking reality to answer). According to QM, this superposition is the reality, and these alternatives should just keep on interacting with each other. But, upon observation, all but one arbitrary survivor disappear. Why? Where do they go and what causes this privileged state of affairs? Traditionally (the Copenhagen Interpretation), this question has been answered with a brush-off - the waveform collapses and you can’t say any more about it.

Einstein did not like this - hence his famous, “God does not play dice with the universe.” The essence of his complaint is that the fundamental description of reality should not leave things unanswered. If things happen randomly then we are faced with absolutely no explanation for them; even reality itself would not know what’s going on. This is ridiculous, but I’ll leave for now just why that is.

Next up:
The Many Worlds interpretation.
Why reality has to be not just deterministic but timeless and unchanging.
How consciousness relates to reality.

I can feel your excitement….