Philosophy of Everything

Let's start by observing that most civilizations and individuals are developing a concept of God or Gods, even without outside preaching. Polytheistic religions Ancient Greeks and Romans had many Gods. Each God was powerful over a certain aspect of life. For example, Poseidon/Neptune governed the sea, storms, earthquakes. Each God embodied a certain aspect of live where human had little understanding about causation. Aphrodite/Venus governed the love, where humans still struggle to understand the causation.

We know that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius, right? Or not ; on mount Everest the water boils at around 70 degrees Celsius, so you can't even boil an egg . Ok, we have a more complex model that links the boiling temperature with pressure, but even that model is not exact at any given pressure. On some temperatures, our linear models fail, for example water cooled below 4 degrees Celsius will not continue to get denser, but it will actually expand, allowing the cold water to float on the surface until it becomes ice. In general, lower temperature would predict lower density in substances. There is nothing in the common physical laws that would predict such anomaly  in water, while we can later construct even more complicated models to explain what is happening with water.

I will approach mindfulness from an informational perspective, adding just a little brain physiology. If you already know about mindfulness, you can directly skip to " The heresy" Introduction As many subjects that I approach in this blog, my knowledge about the subject is at hobby level, maybe a little more than the average guy. One of my childhood dreams was to discover something really new. The strategy that I considered then was to start on that subject without all the prejudice from the previous research done in that domain. I realize now that it is merely impossible to innovate something without having in mind the prior results and mistakes done on that study field. However, I still hope that one can derive new perspectives in a domain by combining common knowledge from various domains. With that said, here is a little essay about how and why mindfulness might  be working for humans. This might depart sometimes from the mainstream conception on mindfulness and ...

Reality is pretty complex, alright... Normally we expect reality to be far more complex than we can comprehend in a limited human mind. Each time we look to one object, many other objects go outside our perception field, even if the eye can still see them. And this is OK, because we have only a limited processing brain power for perceiving the reality. It's not only the limit of perceiving reality, there is also a limit in our capacity of "knowing" about reality. If we think about it, it is very intuitive: the physical mind is far smaller than the reality we want to know about. In order to know about reality, we need to have a model about reality stored inside our minds.

How would you define consciousness? Is dreaming a form of consciousness? What happens when you pass out? Consciousness (like in "aware of himself") is a subjective perception that is normally easily accessible subjectively, by introspection. However, the mechanics of consciousness are hardly understood and the consciousness state is hard to evaluate from outside in non-fully awake mind states. Is there a consciousness while being drugged? Is there a consciousness in catatonic people? Where is the consciousness boundary between being awake and asleep? The following reflections aims to give some clues about the nature of consciousness.

In my 5'th grade, the new professor of Mathematics told us a puzzle: there is a jug with water staying in the desert, and a bird wants to drink some water. However, the jug have a tight neck, like the old Greek pottery for olive oil: it is like a sphere at the bottom, becoming tight while going up, only to enlarge a bit at the entry. At least this is how I imagine it. What is clear, the bird cannot reach the water because the head/beak are too big for the jug entry. How can the bird drink some water from the jug?

I define intelligence as the capacity of one entity to create complex internal representations that can be used to predict about it's environment the likely outcome from a particular configuration or action, based on the regularities of the environment. Entity can be organic life form or (potentially) a natural or artificial inorganic intelligence. The "can be used" instead of "uses" also covers a case of "abstract only" entity that constructs purely theoretical abstract model (think mathematics) and does not use it for any adaptation purposes.

I will call " competency living " the sum of behavioral competencies that allows an organism (in particular a human) to adapt to environment through learning. "Competency living" will not cover simple bacterial strategies like "eat and multiply". However it is not limited to human level intelligence like abstract thinking. In my definition "competency living" will also cover complex animal behaviors like learning to jump over a rock, learning to climb, recognize good food, recognize dangers, flight maneuvers for birds, etc. Only in particular it also covers abstract human thinking. I would speculate that abstract human intelligence is based and emulated on "competency living". Also, I would appreciate that the informational complexity of "competency living" is far greater than the additional needed for implementing abstract thinking. A consequence of this would be that abstract thinking is only gradually more complex than...

A virtual machine is a common example of simulation. It can take the description of a (virtual) "computer" state and continue the execution from that point on. You can simulate a huge computer given a computer with more memory than the virtual machine, although it might be way slower. However, such virtual machine does not answer the problem because it normally simulates a computer with less memory. The question is, can a computer to simulate a virtual computer that has the same capabilities as itself? Before answering this, let's exclude some trivial (forbidden) cases of "simulations": A calculator will always do exactly what it does, it will be identical with itself, we will not call this a simulation of itself. Copying the exact state of another identical computer in a "twin brother" will not be considered simulation. Starting 2 identical computers with the same input will not be considered like one is simulating the other.

"Believe" is often associated with religion. However, even for using the " scientific method ", we are forced to assume certain qualities of the Universe that we cannot prove nor fully verify. The most basic assumption is that there are common laws that are universal and they function the same across the whole Universe. This is a leap of faith that we have to take if we believe that the Universe can be understood at all by humans.

The meaning of music is hard to capture in words. Let's try some ideas anyway! The brain bug The brain has a natural ability to extract patterns from all the stimulus. It's a fact that we like the music that has some patterns: that is not very monotonic (boring) but not very random either, so we can continuously learn some new patterns. Somehow the brain has the illusion that it continuously learns in an accelerated rate by listening music. So music could be considered a small addiction at the first analysis.