Philosophy of Everything

Many physicists observe that Universe seems to be carefully crafted to sustain life. Only slight changes to physical laws constants would make life as we know it impossible. However, I think this is more like a case of selection bias. We observe these physical constants because we happen to live a type of life that is possible in this observable Universe. Thought experiment Let's imagine there are 4 Universes. I don't find too many arguments for the multiverse hypothesis, but let's imagine them for the sake of argument. First Universe is similar to our own Universe, it can sustain a type of life based on Carbon matter combined with various other atoms The second Universe has slightly different physical constants that makes Carbon links unstable. Still, life is still possible based on Silicon, including some humanoid intelligent beings  The third Universe is way different, it consists mostly on anti-matter. However, intelligent life can develop based on Carbon anti-matter Th...

Mathematics is an useful model for reality. However, most inventions that claims that use mathematics are only inspired by mathematics. Sometimes the mathematics was created after the fact. Encryption is 100% based on mathematics, most of the other technologies can be imagined without advanced mathematics - while arithmetic is always useful. Logic is just a tiny bit of mathematics that governs the binary gates used in computers. But nobody makes a complicated integral to decide how tight the electronical gates can be placed - this is based on experiments AFAIK. We still rely on trial and error for most of our inventions. And this is for a good reason, mathematics cannot provide the answer except for models that we already derived from experience. There are many non-linearities in real life that cannot be derived mathematically - take for example the friction of a body with air on very high speed. AFAIK we cannot mathematically calculate the portance of a certain airplane wing except by...

Philosophy of Life Is there a meaning of life? What is the meaning of life? A secular concept of Hell Devil's offer - about the meaning of life Life is very compressible The seed and the terrain Philosophy of Morality Morality derived from space colonization On "morality derived from space colonization" On morality applied to animals Evil as striving for a local maximum Morality and killing Punishment is not really about free will On "Metaphysics of Quality" of Robert M. Pirsig Philosophy of Religion The God concept A secular God Is Your God so small? Philosophy of Knowledge On Intelligent life forms Knowledge is all about prediction How can we all be right even when we believe incompatible things We only have models, not knowledge On Knowledge and beliefs About consciousness Philosophy of Universe We believe in a compressible Universe Genetic code (DNA) is not enough DNA and the fabric of the Universe Reflections on the entropy of Life Lenses of the Unive...

Philosophy of Life Is there a meaning of life? The meaning of human life - for me, now Hell Devil's offer Life is very compressible The seed and the terrain

We consider many propositions about the world as either true or not true.  However, in my view, human knowledge is not a collection of true and false propositions. What we consider as evidently true are only propositions about the world that we believe to have a very small probability to be false. The above is still compatible with an objective Reality, however most of our knowledge about Reality is highly mediated, so that we can rarely be fully certain about something. Mount Everest I "know" that the highest mountain in the world is Everest (from the sea level). However, I never seen that mountain. Even if I could visit and measure mount Everest, it is not realistic for me to check all the other mountains in the world to verify that there is no higher mountain somewhere. Think Popper. I only believe that Everest is the highest mountain in the world because a lot of sources tells me this (externalism). It is unlikely that any of my sources verified personally that there is n...

Russel's paradox is defining "the set of all sets that don't contain themselves". You can show that such construct leads to a contradiction. Read the wiki link for details. I started this article as answer to this article . There is another interesting paradox discussed by Bertrand Russell: "The smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters", actually better known as Berry's paradox  You can also prove that such number creates a contradiction, because you just defined it under sixty letters. For me, the above paradox shows that it is not enough to create a condition for something to exist with that condition - or a set of such elements. Such paradoxes argue that such objects defined by a predicate cannot exist sometimes.

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.

In the double slit experiment , the puzzle is to explain why measurement of which way the particle went destroys the interference pattern. Interference pattern Let's first challenge the usual assumption that the interference pattern is the results of wave phase interference between particles, even when they are passing one by one. The classical interpretation is that the wave of the particle interferes with itself, that is a little far fetched for me. The interference appears for photons, electrons and even bigger molecules. As the slits are rather tight (fractions of millimeters), we can imagine that the particle has a certain phase that interferes with a certain phase of the walls of the slits. Depending on the timing of the interaction, the particle's wave is deviated by an angle that depends on the periodicity of the two waves - the particle and the walls of the slit.  When there is a single slit, the particle tends to synchronize the walls of the slit with its own phase, s...

What is more important to have a plant, the seed or the terrain? If the terrain lacks the needed nutrients or energy source (like sunlight), most plants would not grow. Still, a good terrain is not enough to obtain the desired plants. While uncultivated terrains mostly grow weeds, even for that you need some kind of seeds brought by wind. Without any seed, even the best suitable terrain will not feed life. You need that seed to be able to transform nutrients into amino-acids and other organic compounds. Only a seed can spring life in a suitable terrain. The seed is Information. The seed contains the recipe to transform minerals, water, carbon dioxide and light to organic compounds that can grow plants. This is the power of Information. Without Information, matter don't know how to transform minerals into something interesting and adaptable - like a beautiful flower.

Biological life is somehow very probable on Earth. Even when many species have been extinct, other species emerged, unexpectedly similar, however different. Many of them had backbones, one mouth, two eyes, nails. It is like... life is bound to exist only reusing similar patterns, at least in this time frame.  Once the Earth was too hot to sustain life. Someday it will again be too hot or too cold for life. But for now all is ok, Earth seems to have the right balance of atoms in the air and in the soil to make the life probable, you only need a seed. We can imagine that these conditions are very special. Would it life be possible in rather different conditions, even if the temperature allows and you manage to have water, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen?  Would it still be probable to live rather than die if other minerals that we use today would be more scarce? Would life still work if some minerals would become way more abundant? Would DNA create the same organisms we know when for...

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.

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.

An information representation (or string) s  is very compressible if the size of it's smallest possible compression K(s) is very small compared with it's observed size(s) . The smallest compression size  K(s)  is the Kolmogorov complexity . We can define the compress-ibility C(s) of a string s  to be the smallest compression  K(s)  divided by the size of the original representation  size(s) : C(s) = K(s) / Size(s) - lower is better The smallest compressed size" for any given string is a function that cannot be calculated in general, however you can always find an upper bound to it as soon as you find a compression of that size. A compression of s is basically a program along with it's input that can generate s as output. If is always possible to find a program slightly bigger than s  (think: print " s "), therefore it is only interesting to find compression with size that is lower than size( s ).

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.

This article contains my personal reflections on irrational numbers, especially the informational property of their infinite strings of decimal - strings that often look close to random at a shallow look. It starts with an introduction of known facts, it continues with some less discussed properties and finishes with some philosophical considerations. Introduction Example of irrational numbers are numbers like √2 and ℼ (PI). Irrational numbers cannot be represented as a fraction like, 0.25 is represented by 25/100 or 1/4. Such numbers have an infinite number of decimals that are not repeating any groups we would take. Numbers like 0.(321) are not irrational, even if they have an infinite number of decimals, because they are repeating: 0.321 321 321 321 ... Such numbers with repeating decimal groups can be represented as a simple fraction: 0.321 = 321/999 an therefore are considered "rational". Rational numbers can be represented as fractions (like 234/789), and the...

Science, mathematics, intelligence, every knowledge can be reduced to the ability of predicting the outcome in two directions: "what happens if certain conditions occurs?", "how can I make to obtain a certain outcome". Basically, this is all the expected benefit of knowledge. The theories are just models that have this unique purpose: to link certain pre-conditions to certain outcome. Intelligence, in particular, is used to predict what happens in certain conditions (forward, like f(x)=?), along with finding the way to obtain a certain expected result (backward prediction), like "what x will make f(x)=y". This might seem to be a too simplistic view of intelligence, as intelligence also contains a creative part - that solves very tricky puzzles that even computers cannot solve. Still, I would argue that this activity is also a backward-prediction applied in many steps. Let's consider o detective that is trying to solve a murder case. His problem is ...

Please check my informal introduction to "Kolmogorov complexity" if you are not familiar with the subject. In this article I will approach some less discussed ramifications of it and hopefully some new ideas: an example of a Kolmogorov compression that would require an arbitrary high amount of working memory before shrinking to the compressed string (conjecture). 1. Root cause why "Kolmogorov complexity" is uncomputable Kolmogororov complexity is uncomputable because Turing machines have a halting problem :) Let's start with the observation the the Halting problem of a Turing machine having a limited band is actually decidable, unlike the infinite band one. A "finite band Turing machine" is actually a finite state machine that will either stop without going through the same state, or will cycle infinitely. Having a limited number of possible states, it cannot run too much without repeating a previous state. As soon as the machine returns to...

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...

This is an idea about how intelligence could emerge from simple biological patterns. If confirmed, this could have direct impact about how we understand the human brain and how we can design new Artificial Intelligence systems. There is now a widely spread belief that human brain intelligence is based on very simple structures (neurons) that can implement various thinking processes, based on location and structure. This belief is sustained by researches that shows how brain can learn to perceive with regions that were not initially related to that sensing type (like " seeing with your tongue "). This is the approach taken by various researches that are trying to reproduce human-like brain processes  (like recognizing objects) with general purpose neural networks.

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.