Philosophy of Everything

All that is good In a first approximation, God is a catch-all concept about everything that is unexplained about the world and human life. Such God concept is consistent with most religious beliefs that I know. Most modern religions that contain some kind of "Evil" concept will associate God mainly with things that are good for humans. Here we will use this conceptual dichotomy between God and Evil. The mystery A God that contains all the unexplained features that are favorable to humans is inherently mysterious, even by the above definition. Why life exists rather than not? How that human life exists?

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...

Being burned in hell for an eternity is not the worst that can happen. Even worse than this, for me, is to be entirely washed out from Existence. Burning in hell looks pretty painful indeed, but it still contains a glimpse of hope. After eons of suffering, a redemption is still possible, potentially. Suffering from burns is still a property of Life, something that suffers must exist and must somewhat live. There is still something that exists in the burning hell... Even worse than this, for me, is to disappear, gradually, then totally, from Existence. The eternal void is more frightening that any eternal pain. The eternal void does not leave any glimpse of hope for a better future. The eternal void is no future at all. * * *

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 ).

If we look at layers of matter organization, from elementary particles (electrons, protons or lower) up to Life, we found an interesting steady progress in complexity and a decrease in physical durability. For example atoms are very hard to break. We can do fission on Uranium and other unstable atoms, but generally it requires a huge amount of energy to break an atom's nucleus structure. Even harder and rare is to break a neutron in his components, this happens only in very high energy nuclear reactions. When we go up on the complexity scale, we have molecules that are pretty stable by our norms, however most of them are easily broke by chemical reactions. Some molecules are very stable, however most of them can relatively easily lose their structure by chemical reactions. Complex molecules, like organic amino-acids are even more fragile. Enzymes could modify them. Even ultraviolet Sun rays could easily damage their structure. However, such molecules could have their inform...

"It's more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than to allow the germ to kill his patient. The germ wants to live. The patient wants to live. But the patient has moral precedence because he's at a higher level of evolution" In "Lila, an Inquiry into Morals", Robert M. Pirsig brings intriguing reflections about the philosophy of moral using as pretext a river journey he had on a boat. Here I will bring my insights based on this book. Many of this reflections will be my own re-interpretations that were inspired by the book. Even my understanding on Pirsig's views might not fully correspond to the original author's intention.

We love "cutting edge" technology. We need to have the latest gadget, we need to use this new trendy framework, we need to use the latest update of our favorite software. Newer should be better, right? Actually, each new technology brings a promise of improvement and an additional hidden small risk. You are trying the new innovative painkiller drug that promises to solve your low intensity, but still disturbing, migraines . You can get a real improvement on your condition, you could get no significant improvement or, with a small probability, you could die, like in the recent drug trial in France . Indeed, that was an experimental drug, and many others that took the drug were not affected. Well, this is exactly the danger: if the really bad effects only happens with low probability, it might not even be caught in the trial period...

If you could take a drug that gives you 100 years of constant pleasures in your bad, with no side effects, while someone would feed you by a tube, would you take it? If you think a bit about this question, the answer has an interesting consequence: there must be more in life than physical pleasures.

"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.

I watch my photo archive and I realize that my memory does not recall a lot of things. Even photos from couple of years back seems like pictures of events that happened to someone else. I remember when I took that picture, however it's like I see this for the first time. The memory has a strange way to forget things. I still can't believe that my boy was that small. I know rationally, however I cannot recall the perception of him being that small. Pictures are not only anchors for memories, sometimes they are the only memories. Our children are the first generation that can have, over years, a history in images of their entire life. Of course, we also have some pictures from childhood, but they are too few to create an image of continuity. Most of our childhood pictures are black&while and in studied positions (because of their scarcity) and looks more like taken from a movie/theater than from real life. The general availability of color digital pictures, sometimes incl...

We have a population of animals. Each individual can be associated with a certain "value", expressing his "fit level to the environment". We want to design a simple algorithm in the animal's genes that would make the individuals to mate close to optimal. Let's say that resulting value for the mating is the product of the "value" of the two involved individuals. We will study the case when each individual can only be involved in mating with a single other individual. In this conditions, the close to optimum mating is reached when mating is realized between individuals with very close values. Mathematically, we have a set of positive numbers (the values) and we want to create the pairs of numbers so that the sum of products of each pair will be maximal. This happens when we sort the numbers and we pair each number with the one next to it.

Photo: wikipedia.org Genetic code (DNA) could be seen as the best compression algorithm that we have ever seen . Just think about it: in only around 1 GBytes, DNA could store the information to create a human being, with all the general and specific characteristics and many non-educated behaviors. In 1 GBytes, the current technology could barely store a 1.5 hour movie at rather low quality, but human DNA is able to encode everything that is human in a lifetime.

When I see the continuous fighting over Jerusalem... I would ask the people that are killing each other for a piece of "saint" land: "Is your God so small that He only lives on that little piece of land?"

If there is a meaning of life , then this meaning should only be achievable as long as life exists. You could still believe in a meaning "after life", however I personally find it unlikely. If the meaning would be only after life, the very existence of  this  life would be a bit... meaningless ;) I personally don't believe in a "life after death", at least not as a continuing existence of the person. I would be more willing to accept a kind of fuzzy "life after death" by informational replication and resulted impact on society (like in "live by your good deeds")

You have an intuition on this, even if you cannot articulate it probably. Every major vector of our existence is derived somehow from this intuition: why we make children, why we try to preserve our existence, why we help others, why we don't kill each other. I would postulate that our everyday moral code can be derived from this intuition on "the meaning of life". The major religions captured it in slightly different ways; however there seems to be something more unifying behind various religious dogmas. I believe there is something very convergent in the intuition that we each have about the meaning of life. But wait; is there really a meaning of life? I would answer this by paraphrasing the Descartes's quote "I think, therefore I am". If there would not be any meaning of life, then there would be no meaning in everything we could do. The answer to this question would be meaningless too. If there is no meaning, it does not matter if we ans...