3/24/2007

this much

if i were a medical doctor, i would recommend that people eat more of these jello cups with fruit in them. they are tasty.

i want to stop exaggerating things. not that i have been doing it intentionally, its just kind of natural.

"ill go into peoples houses at night and wreck up the place!" - richard nixon's head.

ah ha! if we really understood what it meant to be intelligent, wouldnt we just be able to be intelligent at will? i believe that ideas like general semantics may be approaching some of the methods that 'intelligent' people utilize, in which case, 'non-intelligent' people would be able to learn to be intelligent. so learn about general semantics. also, think and talk more about what Russell said, that in science, the first things to be understood were the things most distant from us (for instance the motion of the planets), and the last will be the things closest to us (like consciousness). it is unfortunate that i am so familiar with attractive girl's faces, as Russell stated, we understand last what we are most familiar with, and i cannot draw girls faces so well. but they are so attractive. its hard not to be familiar with them.

rilly silly? really seally?

recently i have become very angry about the term "the real world". isnt it obvious? there is no real world. we just made it up, all of it. and every society, every generation, every individual has the choice to either uphold the status quo, or to make it what we think is best. best, historically, has followed many conventions, best for the church, best for the country, best for god... personally, i believe what is best is what maximizes happiness for the individuals. and maximizing the number of individuals for which best occurs, is my goal. although maybe i havent thought any of that through enough, i dont know.

-There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.
-...the main achievement of Einstein was precisely in the fact that he refused to divide verbally time and space, which experimentally cannot be so divided.
-Alfred Korzybski

funny thing about weekends when youre unemployed. they dont mean quite so much. cept you get to hang out with your working friends.

i want to describe, in detail, what i now believe intelligence to be : something about ability to accumulate, interpret, and utilize information. but also, would a really intelligent person be really sad? or really happy? i believe it is impossible to say. intelligence can lead to false conclusions, and false conclusions might be needed to be happy or sad.

so i was thinking, if we could explain physics in terms of number theory, then that would be a really powerful tool to fight creationists. it seems to me that if physics can be described with number theory, then that in some sense constitutes a proof of the nonexistence of a creator. which is weird, cause for a long time ive felt very strongly that such a proof cannot exist. in fact, for a long time ive felt that no true proof can ever exist about reality in general, since everything is open to our interpretation. but if number theory were to explain our most intimate physical theories, then i would feel comfortable saying, regardless of what this reality actually is, it is independent of any creator, i think. the situation is more complex than that, but i dont really care. also, i will remain a strict physicalist regardless of any of this. just because i dont see any way to prove things, doesnt mean that the answers arent self evident.

consider my mind blown.

okay, update on the godless proof, it wouldnt prove the nonexistence of god, but it would certainly remove any 'design' from reality, if there were a creator, he must obey the laws of mathematics, and so must the universe. actually, one thought that came out of all this that i really enjoy, is a way of thinking about mathematics. mathematics is a collection of the most concrete things in the universe, within mathematics are statements which are known with absolute certainty to be true or false. however, mathematics is also completely abstract, conceptual. it is not 'concrete' in any physical sense (obviously).

so, intelligence is, in my opinion, the ability to accumulate, interpret, and apply information. i seem to accel at the first, at least where matters of science are concerned. and i tend to think that i am not very good at the last one, in general. why am i so hung up on girls? i know plenty of intelligent people who do know concern themselves with romance. why is it than that i am so consumed?

Dear Professor Einstein, i am sorry, but i disagree with you on your views of religion. while i agree your thoughts on it are a way to make religion useful, and good, and that in principle it should be this way, the practical application of religion is far from this, and remains so.

also, this morning i wondered, Godel's incompleteness theorems, so what? so who cares if mathematics is always necessarily incomplete. isnt it fitting to know there is an unending amount to discover? there is no limit on the distance to which we take it. also, if number theory does imply physics, then it seems a theory of everything might be necessarily infinitely long. perhaps requiring an infinite number of adjustments to produce your final answer, the way the prime counting function appears to be reproduced with the approximation and the riemann zeta function.

i think, judging by previous experience, that gravity and the electroweak force are probably one and the same. in fact, its likely all forces are one, since the past tends to point to that.

if you did have a black hole, and you threw huge amounts of charged mass into it, or just charge, to increase its charge, could you eventually blow it apart with electric charge?

you are what you eat. im mostly a pig and a chicken. (more chicken than pig)

sometime late in high school, or maybe afterwards, i began to say, "i dont make friends, friends make me". which meant two things. i felt, very strongly that not only was i passive in my friendships, (so my friends were my friends because they had pursued a friendship), but also that my behavior was largely based on being pleasant for others. so i became what i thought my friends wanted me to be, in some sense. recently i remembered all this, and i immediately felt that while the first meaning of the phrase "i dont make friends, friends make me" still held true, that the second phrase no longer did. upon further reflection however, i realized that the second meaning still holds as well, and that the exceptions come from my experience in physics. in the company of close friends, when discussing science or mathematics, my behavior is not influenced by them, its actually me. where the phrase does still apply is within more common social settings, or with less familiar people, when discussing less interesting topics.

so if you want to get to know me, just ask about the world.

there are moments in which i feel as if the entire world makes sense.
in which i feel as if i understand it all.
in which everything seems profoundly beautiful.
and then the most beautiful feelings overwhelm me, for a moment.
so often these states are triggered, it would be hard not to enjoy this.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If we discover who we are, Korzybski would say that madness is just around the corner. The real world does not exist, although its a great place to get a steak.

Thanks for your post, it presented some beautiful insights:)