The universe is a very messy place.
So I spent a while talking to alex, wired out of my mind from watching "Crank," and doing some serious thinking about the nature of reality. Recap, in no particular order, and without, like our conversation, any conclusions. Just stuff to think about.
Problems:
Complexity (And other horrible large scales things).
Small things.
Keep asking "what's it made of?" and eventually you'll end up confused, irritated and depressed. Ok. So there's matter, and than there are atoms, and than there are atomic components - electrons, neutrons, protons, followed by muons, gluons, quarks, gravitons, photons, bosons, neutrinos and other assorted elementary particles.... Than we have strings and domain walls and things (which I need to learn more about), followed by....? Pure quantum functions? On what framework?
Big things.
Conversely, keep asking "what's outside?" and you'll end up in pretty much the same state. Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of really big things is the universe. That's bad enough; almost manageble if thought of as a big bubble, not so much if thought of as truly infinite. Either way, you're going to get, at some point, to the question...."Where is the universe?" Is it inside of something else, or is truly the only something that exists. Pick the former, and you get a nasty case of recursion sickness, pick the latter and you get a headache.
Gravity.
If gravity is theoretically made of particles, and particles are waves... I don't even want to go there. Really, regardless of whether gravity consists of particles, waves, elves, chickens, distortions in space-time or flaws in space-time (any number of other things, also), we run into the framework problem again. SEE: Small Things.
Human scale stuff (sort of).
The indisputable insignifigance of the human race.
Think about the stuff above, and just try to say that the human race is incredibly important in the grand scheme of things. Definition: Emergent Property; essential means "a property that stems from something being more than the sum of it's parts." For example: Ants. Ants are very stupid little creatures, wandering pretty much aimlessly, leaving little trails of phermones, picking stuff up, and returning, albeit rather circuitously at first. Acutally, that should be "an ant is a very stupid creature." However, when you put a bunch of ants together as a colony, all of a sudden, something much more intelligent arises. Ant hills have some very intersting properties; the collective of ants wandering evenutally solves a very complex problem, and devlops a highly optomized route to and from food sources. Ant = dumb, ants = smart.
Think of the earth as a cell (or colony, whichever you prefer), where humans are simply multi-purpose structures.... communications, construction, etc... Animals and things taking care of other duties, etc and soforth. Now, if humans are ants/structures, and the earth is, for our purposes here, the result, already humans are seeming less important. Now scale back some more. Imagine the earth as a single cell in something larger. The human body contains billions upon billions of cells. Where does that leave our earth/cell, with its tiny human parts?
Ouch.
Problems with time.
As I'm getting tired of typing, I'm going to be really quick on this one... Basically, time tends to be subjective, often to the point of flying when you're having fun, and dragging when you're not. This is odd, considering humans are taught/wired to understand time as discrete instances... moreso when one tries to define the smallest unit of time... the "instant." It's like counting up from zero using fractions....where do you start? .01 x 10^-100000 ?
Smaller than that? Is time just a result of entropy...ie: the king's best horses attempting to put an animated egg back together, when really, broken is sort of an entropic end-point (we'll avoid heat, where it goes, the heat-death of the universe or maybe not, and what happens when there isn't any energy left except for heat...though I think that's what the heat-death deal is all about.)
Allright, I'm done for now. I've already forgotten the rest of what was being discussed, though I've remembered why I try to avoid thinking too much about such things. Existencial {sp?} depression is a bitch.
Problems:
Complexity (And other horrible large scales things).
Small things.
Keep asking "what's it made of?" and eventually you'll end up confused, irritated and depressed. Ok. So there's matter, and than there are atoms, and than there are atomic components - electrons, neutrons, protons, followed by muons, gluons, quarks, gravitons, photons, bosons, neutrinos and other assorted elementary particles.... Than we have strings and domain walls and things (which I need to learn more about), followed by....? Pure quantum functions? On what framework?
Big things.
Conversely, keep asking "what's outside?" and you'll end up in pretty much the same state. Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of really big things is the universe. That's bad enough; almost manageble if thought of as a big bubble, not so much if thought of as truly infinite. Either way, you're going to get, at some point, to the question...."Where is the universe?" Is it inside of something else, or is truly the only something that exists. Pick the former, and you get a nasty case of recursion sickness, pick the latter and you get a headache.
Gravity.
If gravity is theoretically made of particles, and particles are waves... I don't even want to go there. Really, regardless of whether gravity consists of particles, waves, elves, chickens, distortions in space-time or flaws in space-time (any number of other things, also), we run into the framework problem again. SEE: Small Things.
Human scale stuff (sort of).
The indisputable insignifigance of the human race.
Think about the stuff above, and just try to say that the human race is incredibly important in the grand scheme of things. Definition: Emergent Property; essential means "a property that stems from something being more than the sum of it's parts." For example: Ants. Ants are very stupid little creatures, wandering pretty much aimlessly, leaving little trails of phermones, picking stuff up, and returning, albeit rather circuitously at first. Acutally, that should be "an ant is a very stupid creature." However, when you put a bunch of ants together as a colony, all of a sudden, something much more intelligent arises. Ant hills have some very intersting properties; the collective of ants wandering evenutally solves a very complex problem, and devlops a highly optomized route to and from food sources. Ant = dumb, ants = smart.
Think of the earth as a cell (or colony, whichever you prefer), where humans are simply multi-purpose structures.... communications, construction, etc... Animals and things taking care of other duties, etc and soforth. Now, if humans are ants/structures, and the earth is, for our purposes here, the result, already humans are seeming less important. Now scale back some more. Imagine the earth as a single cell in something larger. The human body contains billions upon billions of cells. Where does that leave our earth/cell, with its tiny human parts?
Ouch.
Problems with time.
As I'm getting tired of typing, I'm going to be really quick on this one... Basically, time tends to be subjective, often to the point of flying when you're having fun, and dragging when you're not. This is odd, considering humans are taught/wired to understand time as discrete instances... moreso when one tries to define the smallest unit of time... the "instant." It's like counting up from zero using fractions....where do you start? .01 x 10^-100000 ?
Smaller than that? Is time just a result of entropy...ie: the king's best horses attempting to put an animated egg back together, when really, broken is sort of an entropic end-point (we'll avoid heat, where it goes, the heat-death of the universe or maybe not, and what happens when there isn't any energy left except for heat...though I think that's what the heat-death deal is all about.)
Allright, I'm done for now. I've already forgotten the rest of what was being discussed, though I've remembered why I try to avoid thinking too much about such things. Existencial {sp?} depression is a bitch.