Notes on a conversation with a friend ... The subject of time has fascinated me since I was a little kid. Time is a real thing - an aspect of the platform that reality is built on. But physics fails to put a finger on the moment we call "now". In one direction, the one we call "future', what will happen is fundamentally unknowable before it happens. That comes out of Chaos theory and Quantum Mechanics. On a more subtle level, we are also unable to know the past in detail. In my experience, philosophers and theology shine no light on these issues, but often claim ersatz credibility by dropping references, especially to Quantum Mechanics, hoping that most of their audience will not understand the reference. On a psychological level, it is not clear why the "present" has any special status when it comes to "knowability". Neurologically speaking, there is no "now", only an experience of what I consider to be a dynamic change in the state of ...

(A note to Len) Our mathematical models (or our ability, in general, to predict or "understand" a system) must always be bound by an artificial "carving out" of the application domain of understanding specification of scale - including the applicability of our tools to the scale we are working with recognition of the precision we expect or the precision that is even theoretically possible. This visualizes a "fractal" nature of reality (or our models of reality) up to a point, where models at one scale fail at a different one. In "Road To Reality" Penrose attempted to construct a framework for a smooth transition from one model to another (Relativity to Quantum Mechanics, for example). I'm afraid I remained unconvinced but partly because I'm too lazy or too stupid to follow his arguments in detail. In a hypothetical University curriculum in this field (which still needs to be named), I think that scale, chaos, non-linear systems a...

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading lately. Things seem to be coming together in a way that demands a bit of summarization. THE PROBLEM OF "MIND I think Dennet's reductionist approach is wrong. He seems to think that everything important about "mind" can be learned from studies of the way the physical brain works (neurology) plus experiments with subjects to correlate what is known about the brain with what subjects reveal about their "first person" experience of the world. This is a "bottom up" approach. I would say that for, humans at least, the brain is almost certainly necessary but not sufficient to create a "mind". The first person experience of the world is infinite, open-ended and individual. It can't be "averaged" and will resist creation of general "laws" of much interest. The mind is, to a first approximation, identical with the first person experience of the Universe. At first, there woul...

Laughlin's " A Different Universe " provides a sweeping re-examination of the idea of "emergence", along with a telling criticism of the doctrine of reductionism.   Although I'm not sure Daniel Dennett would admit it, he's a poster child of reductionism. He basically claims that the "mind" can be completely understood by examining a subject (i.e., the brain of the subject) from the "outside". The mind is "nothing more" than the activity of neurons in the brain. Opposed to this view is the idea of emergence: that a system of "simple" components can spontaneously reorganize itself into something new, specifically something with properties and behavour that cannot be derived, even in principal, from laws governing the components. That's Laughlin. Laughlin's book is a bit of a disorganized mess, but it's possible to glean some very important ideas from it. He makes some powerful general observations about t...

[From Yabberz Greatest Hits] Perhaps right at the core of most religious thought is the idea that "things happen for a reason". In the Biblical tradition, this reason is in the Mind of God. His plan has a fundamentally moral aspect (it's good and merciful). Everyone outside of mental hospitals agrees that the "plan" is completely inscrutable. Even when stripped of all the particulars of theology, many people cling to the last vestiges of this idea. They ask "why" a person is "taken away" in the prime of life or "why" innocent, good people are destroyed by random events like hurricanes and earthquakes. The question is always rhetorical. It's rude to attempt an answer. Even those who think there is no reason feel in their bones that there  ought  to be one. I've often encountered people who earnestly believe in "fate", which is (to me) the silly idea that whatever happened was what somehow  had  to happen. This pulls...

My thoughts about the four economies have emerged from thinking about money and debt. Some writers, especially Graeber  do a great job of sketching what money is (debt) and prying the concept away from "value". Graeber makes dire predictions about the fate of the world based solely on the nature of money. Graeber seems to think that, by the very nature of money, debt expands to choke the "real" economy - a phenomenon he calls "debt deflation". I think that Graeber's misunderstands the way that money works and its relationship to the other economies we live in, most obviously value (which is constantly being created and destroyed) and information (which mostly grows at an exponential rate, contributing to a growing percentage of the value of everything we buy). However, Graeber's analysis is helpful in pointing out that many transactions involving money and the creation of debt take place entirely in the "money universe" without inc...