Catmachine

Have you ever wondered what it's like to die? I'm not talking about the famous tunnel of light reported by near death experience patients ; by definition that isn't what it's like to die otherwise those describing it wouldn't have been able to pass on their report. If this is the case, then it could very well be impossible to know; however, I'd like to make an informed guess. Ever since I've been writing this blog on a regular basis I've touched on topics like the nature of consciousness, time, space and reality. It shouldn't be that difficult to cobble together a basic description of the dying of the light. I'm not really that concerned with the actual cause of death, provided it's not being run over by a steamroller or evaporated by a nuclear explosion. I'm more interested in deaths of the slipping away variety. I'm going to start talking about noses here for a paragraph or so. It's not as much of a non sequitur as it m...

Readers of my recent blog entry about how reality is in all probability a computer simulation are quite right to feel sceptical. It's clearly a ridiculous notion, a clever bit of philosophical reasoning designed to invoke a paradox. Instinctively we know this. The Simulation Hypothesis goes against what we feel is the truth and as William of Occam himself carved with his famous Razor, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. The original words of Occam's Razor are in fact particularly astute in this case; pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate or in plain English, plurality should not be posited without necessity . Why hypothesize a multitude of simulations when one simple reality will do? It's just common sense. However, common sense isn't always right. The ancients believed that the Earth was flat - and you can see why. It feels like common sense. Down is down - it's where things fall to. The ground is clearly flat and the sky "u...

Nothing is real. No, that's not strictly true. To put it another way, everything is real. If it wasn't real it wouldn't be . The point I'm trying to make is that this world may very well not be the real one. Whatever that means. I'll start again. There is a theory that states that if it ever became possible to simulate reality in a computer, such a simulation would be indistinguishable from the real thing and any inhabitants of the simulation would be completely unaware that they were all simply part of a gigantic computer program. There is another theory that states that this has already happened. It's known as the Simulation Hypothesis and has been put forward by Nick Bostrom who is either a philosopher at the University of Oxford or (if his hypothesis is to be believed) a simulation of a philosopher at a simulation of the University of Oxford. The premise is very simple. If, hypothesises Bostrom, it ever becomes possible to simulate reality i...

Kernel Panic Tomorrow morning is when I go into hospital to have a general anaesthetic for the very first time. It's an interesting concept. Looking at the operation of the brain as analogous to that of a computer it's more like a hard reboot, actually being switched off and on again as opposed to mere sleep which is more comparable to being in stand-by or, well, sleep mode. Will I feel any different afterwards? I'm hoping that such a restart will clear out any unwanted program loops, neuroses that have been running unchecked ever since a random combination of circumstances and input set them off. Mentally I should feel better, that is once I've stopped feeling nausea. And, most interestingly, what will happen to my consciousness? I have heard that by all accounts it's as if no time has passed; as the inhabitants of the Dollhouse say " Did I fall asleep? " This makes sense from a materialistic point of view. No new data is entered or data sorting takes...

It's that strange time of year again, when, due to the odd way I visualise numbers and dates , I start to get (santa) claustrophobia. There is something about the period between Christmas and New Year that feels the wrong size. The whole of the final quarter of the year seems to be a build up to the festive season, which whatever your belief system and curmudgeonity-level is at least a break from the day to day grind of everyday life and a chance to relax and recharge the batteries. What's more, if you're fortunate, you get over a week off work gratis without having to use up any valuable leave days. Then after the blowout of 25th December you crawl up through the trapdoor into 26th and realise there's nowhere to go. It's not so much another storey like the rest of the weeks have been, but the attic of the year, and not one that's been given a swanky loft makeover either - this is the old fashioned kind with bare beams, darkness, spiders, old cardboard boxes, ...

I've spent the last few blog entries if not explaining it away then at least arguing that an afterlife is unlikely and that this is all we've got. This isn't as cheerless a claim as it might first sound. Many materialists gloomily cry " This is all there is! ", their faces contorted in melancholia (and, not to put too fine a point on it, no small measure of glee at spreading the bad news). I don't subscribe to this point of view; I'm trying to explore and expand my knowledge of our existence. I'm not starting from a traditional position of Heaven and Earth and then scribbling out great swathes of the firmament; I'm starting from a single cell and marveling at how far we've come and what it means to be conscious in the four dimensions of spacetime, and many worlds of the quantum multiverse. However, my subconscious obviously isn't entirely happy with my recent activities as several times over the last few days I've dreamed about the af...

Previously in this blog... I started out discussing borders and ended up defining the shape of our selves in spacetime , four-dimensional mirrorballs cascading through the white water of the time axis. The reflective skin of the edge of self could be thought of as being like a two-way mirror. Information falls onto the boundary of the sensorium and is reflected back as we describe and interact with the universe at large. What others see of our selves is merely our personal reflection of the universe according to us, but on the other hand we probably think of our actual selves as homunculi sitting inside the spherical two-way mirror, observing but invisible to the outside world. But isn't this just an illusion? As discussed before there are no homunculi ; postulating their existence to explain consciousness invokes recursion as we then have to imagine the mechanism whereby the homunculus is sentient and so on... and any theory that invokes recursion or infinity probably has a ...

I realise that in the last entry I made a fundamental error describing the death and birth as a "border" in the sense I was using it. Whilst they are points on a boundary between being and not-being , they're not points on a border that anyone can cross. So I reiterate that there isn't really such a thing as being dead . One could say that not being alive is describable, if only as the absence of an actual state, but actually having a word for it, dead , seems odd when you think about it. After all, we don't have a separate word for not being in pain , despite the fact that (hopefully) it is the state in which we spend most of our lives. You might think I'm playing games with words here. That might be the case, but words themselves are immensely powerful. In my continuing study into what makes us into conscio us , I have discovered (mainly through reading and thought experiments as practical investigation in this field is tricky for the amateur) that in...

There is one border we don't usually get to linger on; we only ever cross it twice. That is the border between being alive and not being alive. The checkpoints are one way only, and are named Birth and Death. When we think about it this way, we realise there's no such thing as " being dead ". From a materialist point of view, the state before birth and the state after death are the same thing. And yet there's no way, for example, I'd describe myself as having been " dead " in 1960. Yet logically there's no difference whatsoever. Whatever makes you you is your mind, and even though hardcore materialists claim that's all smoke and mirrors, your consciousness has a definite existence however it's derived. So, unconventional theories of time and mind aside, any time period during which your consciousness doesn't exist is no different from another. So we die, but we are never dead. For instance: Where is Douglas Adams ? He's...

Boundaries can be the most fascinating places in the universe. They come in many kinds. Some are physical borders such as the change from desert to jungle, a river, the boundary between the heliopause and interstellar space. Sometimes they’re territorial or imaginary in origin such as the border between England and Scotland or the Greenwich Meridian. Occasionally the latter try and make themselves the former, as happened with the Berlin Wall , the Maginot Line or the Gaza Strip Barrier . Generally though in the grand scheme of things these political borders are invisible; even the Great Wall of China , originally a territorial border and allegedly visible from space, no longer marks the boundary between the People’s Republic and its next-door neighbours and in the twenty-first century is merely the fossil of Qin Shi Huang ’s ambition. Some borders are a state of mind, sometimes literally. They bisect the fourth dimension of your lifestream, lines drawn between knowledge and ign...