In my previous post about reality, I talked about how arbitrary is what we experience as "reality"; based on our size scale, limited senses, and strictly human concepts (causes, delimitations, similarities...), which are not extrapolable to whatever exists outside us. That "outside" existed before any human concept shaped it, and will exist free of shape after the last human dies. Finally, doing science beyond macroscopic observables (beyond Newton and Maxwell laws), we have started to discover an extremely counter–intuitive Nature; this time the real one. But while deconstructing everything I could, I noted briefly about we ourselves, so then... Are we as false or arbitrary as our concepts?
Evolutive requirements for efficient reactions, environment comprehension, problem resolution, and so on, drove us to form ever so complex concepts, find ever so subtle relationships between them. But the important part is that the process of forming such abstractions is completely automatic (as the color reconstruction of our vision is). We don't notice it. Our senses make an implicit division between "observer" and "observed", it's just a matter of geometry, of perspective. If we add memory to the mix, as a mechanism for selective sensorial recurrence and behavioral inertia formation, we form an ego... automatically. So we have a name, a history (though we only remember a minimal part of it), a style, multiple supposed relationships with many supposed "others", like objects, people, communities, ideas...
The fact that our senses induce perspective on our perceptions should not be so important after all; it's only geometrical perspective. Sadly, this perspective constantly feeds a sense of false duality, which is deeply rooted in our psyche and our occidental culture: Our languages have dichotomic grammars, separating subjects who act from objects of action, from actions per se. Prevalent religious views split the world even further, between "animate" souls living in our priviledged bodies and "inanimate" "rest of things" subject to exploitation. Memory helps a lot, feeding conciousness with subjective sensations, albeit past ones.
It's really interesting to note that, what we are now seems fleeting and intangible, while what we were previously seems fixed and definite; so we identify ourselves more with what no longer exists than with what really is (we, now). Sure, there are many subjective points of view, which are able to experiment (conciousness), while many other things (stones, plants, computers, people deeply asleep or under anesthesia...) are unable to. But, does it justify such a bigheaded dualistic attitude, considering ourselves separated, esentially different from the rest of the universe? Wouldn't be better for those little, temporarily concious regions of the big universe to consider themselves freckles in a skin, being also skin?
Yes, it would be better. Big mistakes bring big costs. From the very moment a person defines herself out of arbitrary boundaries from her matrix, Necessity, the Great Devil, promptly appears. Now individuals constantly feel endless needs, including even the need to needing something. All of them are related to the basic error, that of a false identification with our geometric point of view and our distorted selection of memories, but we usually take this error even further, dropping ideologies into the sack of identity, pieces of religions (often contradictory ones, like being Catholic and believing in past lifes or the inevitability of fate), obsessions, historical nationalist falsehoods, heinous hatred against other identities... Every atrocity ever made traces clearly to this Great Devil.
With basic knowledge of astronomy (I mean remembering the name of a handful of stars, being roughly aware of the size and power of those enormous balls of hydrogen, at those enormous distances in space and time from which they seem to be little spots in that gargantuan emptyness), just humbly look at the sky on a starry night and all those stupid needs should now be difficult to hold. In fact, it's so easy to have those moments of truth... I guess every lie in the human world is aligned toward not allowing people to experience such an easy nirvana (or so easily forgetting it in our daily life).
Well, then, after all of this... What are we?—We're not the content of that "sack of identity", but what painfully carts the sack around; we're not our memories, but that which remembers; we're not any of the emotions that can be felt, but that which feels them; we're not (curiously, this one might seem more obvious, but it's in fact identical to previous sentences) what we see, but that which sees it... it's so simple to understand that by our unprecedented lean toward artificial complexity it becomes impossible to do (I mean always understanding, not only in the moment when reading about it). Finally, what's "that" which carts around, which remembers, feels or sees?—An instant.
The brain is a hierachical abstraction machine. From sensorial impulses, small neuron groups recognize simple patterns (lines, musical intervals, smells, colors, etc.), from which more and more neurons recognize patterns over patterns, reaching higher abstraction levels, up to being able to deal with incredibly subtle ones, such as when we notice false emotions in someone's face expressions. This abstraction capacity is fundamental to our conciousness function, in a chalk–blackboard relationship. Finally, it turns out that this abstraction system, with all of its arbitrariness, false needs and mistakes, is the best the universe has managed to achieve feeling and understanding itself... around here.
Saturday 25 December 2010
Monday 20 December 2010
About reality
Most of us may realise, from time to time, that we live our lifes with a narrow view. But in a sense, it's even worse than narrow: it's mostly automatic. But we don't realise how automatic it is. Let me show you some shocking evidence...
Human retina has two kind of light sensitive cells. They are called "rods" and "cones", the former are for low–light black and white vision, the later are for full color, detailed vision. I hope this was expected, but the shocking fact is that cones cover only a small central region of our vision, roughly the size of our open hand at arm length. The whole rest of it is made of strictly black and white rods. So our full color vision is mostly synthetic.—Oh, what a marvelous brain trick... We should realize this, but don't stop here. Visible colors are nothing special from a physical point of view. Infrared light and ultraviolet, microwaves and x-rays, radio waves and cosmic gamma rays share exactly the same nature, they are all photons, only they have different wavelenghts.
So our (mostly synthetic) picture of reality is arbitrary. Think about it: if your eyes where only radio wave sensitive, your concept of "solid things" would be different. Sure, you would discover ordinary solid things crashing against them, but if you where as small as a neutrino you could have crossed the entire planet Earth without ever touching anything. Do you think you are good looking? Look at yourself in an x–ray cranial radiography... It may be hard to realise how arbitrary is our view of what we call "reality", but it's a fact. Colors, objects, sounds, smells, temperatures... the only ones we know are all selected arbitrarily by our senses' capabilities, from our size scale. May I be a jerk, but the key word here is arbitrary, against "substantial", against "absolute", against "real".
Now let's do some mental time-trip: let's go back to the Cretacic period. We are visualizing the world some 149.994.000 years before Noe's Ark. And now I ask you: Were there any dinosaurs? —The answer is... no, there weren't: Before men there were no dinosaurs, there were no plants, there were no planet, no thing. If there were no humans talking about dinosaurs, then there were none. "Dinosaur" is an arbitrary human concept, as it is "plant", "planet", etc. Before us there were no human concepts, and after us there won't be. Human concepts need humans to support them, to define boundaries, forms that abstract them so there can be similarities and differences. It's so hard to see the obvious, that human beings keep asking themselves those silly trascendental questions: «What is our reason to exist, or the reason for everything else's existence?» «Why are we all here?»
I don't care answering such stupid questions. They suppose there should be a "reason", and then ask for it. But outside our beloved human vision of the world, there is no reason concept whatsoever; no language in which to express it, no subject for no phrase, no object for no verb. Not even anything happens! because "to happen" needs arbitrary (human) time and space marks like "begin", "from", "to", "end" to define the event which is supposed to happen. So there isn't even the need for a reason—bad news, God!. Of course we could also cast doubt on the object in the question: we ourselves; but that's worth another post.
It turns out that reality is like it is, not like we imagine it is. So simple. There is something I really love about modern physics (quantum mecanics, general relativity), it's something they show to us about reality, about how human so limited intuition crashes against it. For instance, a photon—resuming the example about our vision—is something that would have no mass at all at rest, and, being unable to stop, accelerate or decelate, appears to us as a little ball impacting on a detector screen (like our retina) or as a wave interfering itself after passing simultaneously through two holes in a barrier (diffraction blur when using small aperture taking photos is also caused by their wave–like nature) ...being neither. It's the unit of kinetical energy transfer (when two objects collide, they just interchange photons). It could not percieve time nor distance, because, from its "point of view", it takes nothing to reach every place in the universe. It's such an odd object (or phenomenon), with such an eccentric and incomprehensible behaviour... that many people think it's completely unimaginable to us. But I say: Of course it's unimaginable to us!
Everything real is unimaginable!
Human retina has two kind of light sensitive cells. They are called "rods" and "cones", the former are for low–light black and white vision, the later are for full color, detailed vision. I hope this was expected, but the shocking fact is that cones cover only a small central region of our vision, roughly the size of our open hand at arm length. The whole rest of it is made of strictly black and white rods. So our full color vision is mostly synthetic.—Oh, what a marvelous brain trick... We should realize this, but don't stop here. Visible colors are nothing special from a physical point of view. Infrared light and ultraviolet, microwaves and x-rays, radio waves and cosmic gamma rays share exactly the same nature, they are all photons, only they have different wavelenghts.
So our (mostly synthetic) picture of reality is arbitrary. Think about it: if your eyes where only radio wave sensitive, your concept of "solid things" would be different. Sure, you would discover ordinary solid things crashing against them, but if you where as small as a neutrino you could have crossed the entire planet Earth without ever touching anything. Do you think you are good looking? Look at yourself in an x–ray cranial radiography... It may be hard to realise how arbitrary is our view of what we call "reality", but it's a fact. Colors, objects, sounds, smells, temperatures... the only ones we know are all selected arbitrarily by our senses' capabilities, from our size scale. May I be a jerk, but the key word here is arbitrary, against "substantial", against "absolute", against "real".
Now let's do some mental time-trip: let's go back to the Cretacic period. We are visualizing the world some 149.994.000 years before Noe's Ark. And now I ask you: Were there any dinosaurs? —The answer is... no, there weren't: Before men there were no dinosaurs, there were no plants, there were no planet, no thing. If there were no humans talking about dinosaurs, then there were none. "Dinosaur" is an arbitrary human concept, as it is "plant", "planet", etc. Before us there were no human concepts, and after us there won't be. Human concepts need humans to support them, to define boundaries, forms that abstract them so there can be similarities and differences. It's so hard to see the obvious, that human beings keep asking themselves those silly trascendental questions: «What is our reason to exist, or the reason for everything else's existence?» «Why are we all here?»
I don't care answering such stupid questions. They suppose there should be a "reason", and then ask for it. But outside our beloved human vision of the world, there is no reason concept whatsoever; no language in which to express it, no subject for no phrase, no object for no verb. Not even anything happens! because "to happen" needs arbitrary (human) time and space marks like "begin", "from", "to", "end" to define the event which is supposed to happen. So there isn't even the need for a reason—bad news, God!. Of course we could also cast doubt on the object in the question: we ourselves; but that's worth another post.
It turns out that reality is like it is, not like we imagine it is. So simple. There is something I really love about modern physics (quantum mecanics, general relativity), it's something they show to us about reality, about how human so limited intuition crashes against it. For instance, a photon—resuming the example about our vision—is something that would have no mass at all at rest, and, being unable to stop, accelerate or decelate, appears to us as a little ball impacting on a detector screen (like our retina) or as a wave interfering itself after passing simultaneously through two holes in a barrier (diffraction blur when using small aperture taking photos is also caused by their wave–like nature) ...being neither. It's the unit of kinetical energy transfer (when two objects collide, they just interchange photons). It could not percieve time nor distance, because, from its "point of view", it takes nothing to reach every place in the universe. It's such an odd object (or phenomenon), with such an eccentric and incomprehensible behaviour... that many people think it's completely unimaginable to us. But I say: Of course it's unimaginable to us!
Everything real is unimaginable!
Sunday 19 December 2010
Welcome to my blog!
I cannot thank internet enough for giving me the opportunity to learn so many things. It's a bit difficult for me to write in English, but that's the least I can do in return. If everybody had written only in their own language, i would be poorer now, as so many others.
In this blog I will share thoughts, analysis, some experiences. It will also be a personal exercise in English, so I have an excuse to keep writing... obviously I'll face little audience or none. There are moments in one's life when just writting is enough, seeing how thoughts that needed years to form, finally go out.
There is another blog of mine, Alidades (in Spanish), from which I'll translate many of its posts into this one. It will be really interesting to see how mood changes when writing the same things, another time, in another language. Maybe we are not as solid as we thought, and we are in fact just reflecting our environment in some way. When we change our voice, our thoughts follow. So are thoughts more than words?
In this blog I will share thoughts, analysis, some experiences. It will also be a personal exercise in English, so I have an excuse to keep writing... obviously I'll face little audience or none. There are moments in one's life when just writting is enough, seeing how thoughts that needed years to form, finally go out.
There is another blog of mine, Alidades (in Spanish), from which I'll translate many of its posts into this one. It will be really interesting to see how mood changes when writing the same things, another time, in another language. Maybe we are not as solid as we thought, and we are in fact just reflecting our environment in some way. When we change our voice, our thoughts follow. So are thoughts more than words?
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