Philosophy of Everything

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...

We know that cancer is when some human cells are multiplying very fast and then spread all over the organism. The are many substances that seems to be "cancerigenic". However, recently we started to link some cancers to bacterial or viral infections. What is more probable: that a chemical substance makes a cell to multiply and spread, or some viral/bacterial DNA is reprogramming cells to multiply and spread?

It makes a lot of sense for the US to wish for an Europe that is not big enough to fight economically with US. China is a problem enough. It made sense for Cambridge Analytica to work for Trump and Brexit even without the Russian involvement. The dollar($) value is affected while more goods are traded in Euro. Also, China owns too much dollar bills, they can put pressure on dollar if China moves more savings/commerce in Euro. Russia is not such an economical power yet, so EU is a bigger economical threat for US at this moment. Trump itself kind of said it. From what he said, I suspect that US have a lot of problems with the import/export balance and Euro might further erode the power of the dollar. Great Britain was always a kind of brother of US, so US wants it on their side. This is just a theory/speculation with no proof. Dear reader, please leave a message if you exist! ;) Also, please share this article if you find it interesting. Thank you.

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...

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.

Intelligent people learn to adapt to environment,  unintelligent people adapt environment to them  (popular joke) 1. Change the outside Few people can be happy when basic needs are not met. When you are hungry or in pain it is unlikely that something else would make you happy. Even with the basic needs fulfilled, many people have higher order needs, like being appreciated, achieving their highest potential.

In a temperate musical octave , there are 12 possible sounds. However, in a certain melody, usually, only 7 of them are used. When you see, for example, "Symphony...in Do major", you should expect that it is based on the white piano keys only. When using others scales, like for "Symphony... in Re#", some of the white keys will be replaced by some of the black keys. Let's see the 12 keys in one piano octave:

I claim that most of the modern moral problems can be translated into "does this increases the likelihood of space colonization for humans?" This covers both traditional religious-based moral and more modern secular moral. You should take it with a grain of salt, of course ;), but let's see how it goes...

I think that nobody should be coerced to vaccinate, himself or his child. I vaccinated my child because I considered that it is better like this. However, each person should have the right to choose for himself, ideally after knowing the true known risks of vaccinating and not vaccinating. There is this theory that people that refuses to vaccinate prevents the full eradication of many diseases. They say that refusal to vaccinate not only affect the people that decides this, but also the people that vaccinate themselves but are in the small percent of people where vaccine is not effective. I say we should take this risk of having not-vaccinated people in society. Here are some arguments:

My kid is close to 4 years and started to exhibit a very human brain process: before sleepping, he starts to remember random ideas and expresses them. Sometimes they are not only memories and plans he had over day, some are really new and original ideas - even that many are yet childish of course. It is not something that could be related to a sudden thought association, he just has "ideas". It does not happen only before the sleep, it just happens more often then. Before the sleep it is also easier to eliminate hypothesis like "this thing remembered him about that other thing". This process could show some light about how brain and neurons works, and possibly helping to design more human-like artificial intelligence. I would speculate that the same process that makes ideas and memories to pop up out of nothing, to be the process that permits the most amazing thought processes in humans.

I will argue below that sorting of a big array, using only comparison, is inherently harder than solving the problem of choosing the best next move on a chess game. One could say that it is not fair to put in competition a big, however finite, problem like chess with an arbitrary big problem like sorting n elements. Fair enough; the interesting thing is that sorting becomes inherently harder than chess for an "n" that is way smaller than you would expect, like sorting 3000 elements. At least in theory... Sorting takes a minimum of n* log 2 (n) comparisons,  more exactly  log 2 (n!) This is about sorting "by comparison only" and can be proven in 2 step. You can skip to the "chess" part if you already know this. 1. Sorting can be done in  log 2 (n!) comparisons, that is just slightly less than n* log 2 (n). We are used to consider sorting an O (n* log 2 (n)) problem. Actually there are algorithms that can do the sorting with little less t...

What gives value to money? There was a time when money was pure gold. Later, money was a certificate that you own a quantity of gold in bank (banknotes). Now the money are just quality paper, without any deposit behind. How that it has any value? Some said that money is just a convention, and the fact that the state accepts that coin as the "legal tender" gives it value. However, we know many coins that lost theirs value despite the state effort to  sustain it. How that other coins survives? I claim that debt is the one that gives value to the today's (fiat) money.

The genetic code seems to not be enough to describe the complexity of a human being . In fact, it seems too small to describe most of the life forms. We could assume that the genetic code has all the information very compressed, but still... I will approach the problem of describing life complexity based of information theory.

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.

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.

A friend told me once that we are living in an Universe full of unprovable truths. He was referring to the Gödel's incompleteness theorems . Without being very formal, this says that there are many mathematical propositions that might be true but we cannot prove them using a computer program or any predictive way of checking, no matter how huge amount of time we can spend. We can find the proof for some, by luck, but for most of them we cannot find either a proof or disproof. In fact this "unprovable" propositions are way more many than the provable propositions. The provable propositions are like the set of natural numbers "N" and the unprovable propositions are like the set of real numbers (R).