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## Archive for March, 2009

March 15th, 2009 by Sean Certainty

Why is it that, the older we get, the more certain we become about reality?

And the more certain we become, the less magic there seems to be in the world?

Of course we can answer this in the boring sense: by virtue of having “unknowns” in your belief system, you subjectively sense magic because you cannot predict the future. It’s an inevitable result, limited to the confines of the mind. An illusion born out of your own ignorance.

Yeah, I get it.

What if it isn’t an illusion though? What if, by virtue of holding on to uncertainty, you genuinely affect reality, and allow magical things to happen? Meaning that: if you hold on to uncertainty, reality itself behaves differently for you.

It’s a mind-fuck. It blurs the line between subjectivity and objectivity.

I would like to test this theory out, but I have no clue how to go about it. How do you measure how uncertain you are? How do you determine whether this uncertainty is affecting reality, or mearly your perception of reality? How do you locate and bottle up the unknown?

Posted in Note to Self, Philosophy, Belief Systems | 10 Comments »

March 10th, 2009 by Sean Emergence

I’ve been on vacation the last two weeks. As is my routine, I like to buy an interesting book to read during the down times. It just so happens I stumbled upon a fantastic book that discusses many of the things I find interesting concerning the philosophy of science:

Reinventing the Sacred, by Stuart A. Kauffman

At first I was skeptical, but the author eventually won me over. Not by using some New Age mumbo-jumbo and dangerous thoughts… but by appealing to logic, reason, mathematics, science, and evidence! Fantastic! (On the down side, some areas become very hard to read because it can almost be too technical, and he is very long-winded.)

His argument is against the modern addiction to “reductionism”, which basically says: whatever object we want to study, we just need to take it apart, and study the parts. Kauffman argues against it by giving example after example of emergent properties of complicated systems. These properties are unpredictable. Not because we aren’t smart enough - Kauffman argues they are inherently unpredictable.

One example to demonstrate this is music. For example, your average song is around three minutes long, which is about three megabytes of information when stored in mp3 format. Therefore, given enough time, we could sit and listen to all three minute songs - simply by enumerating all the computer bits on and off, in all combinations. So, on the surface, it looks like there is a limit to our creativity, and reductionism is the winner.

Kauffman’s response is: it’s impossible to actually do that. The numbers are too large. So the only way to move forward is to creatively make new music, because this “listen to every song” experiment is utterly useless.

However, in creating new music, even more music becomes accessible. So there is actually an ebb and flow to this creativity process. Technically speaking, all songs created will fit in our three megabytes… so it’s not like we’re breaking any rules. But this process of creating is insanely important, because it finds the best and most diverse range of songs, in the most efficient matter.

Now, read that all again, but replace “music” with “protein strands”, or “economy”, or “evolution”, and you get the idea of what Kauffman is talking about. Except he is much more scientific, and actually has the data to back it up.

It’s a very interesting read, and I highly recommend it. I may talk more about it latter, if I can compress his ideas down into readable chunks.

Posted in Books, Science | 7 Comments »

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