I want and I feel..

I just feel really down when I go into a hospital, or Job Centre, or anywhere where people are studiously working, and it's all quietish.

I want to be in the middle of the countryside lying deep down in the long deep grass with the glorious sunshine shining down on my face, with endless green glades and my soulmate gazing down deep into my eyes, full of endless love and compassion. I want to feel that everything is wonderful and everything will come right at the end.

I want to feel that life is one wonderful adventure. I want everything to come right at the end. I want . . I want . . an ultimate point to my beingness, to the Universe, to all things. 

The Mysteries of Existence

There are mysteries regarding existence that are sufficiently complex, obscure, opaque or recondite that none of us can ever hope to fathom. Questions such as, what is this world? Why are we here? What is the good life? How ought we to live? Are our lives and the reality we find ourselves in akin to a dream, or, alternatively, of some ultimate importance?  In a shrewdness of apes, would the most intelligent ape have any hope of reaching any type of tentative answers to these questions at all?  Shrewd he might be, but I guess that he most emphatically would not. But then, why do we imagine human beings are any better equipped to answer such questions?

Going back in time and inhabiting my 15 year old body

I'm just wondering what I would do if, say tomorrow, when I woke up I bizarrely found myself in my 15-year-old body back where I used to live in Wolviston Court Estate, Billingham. But I have all my present memories, my present intelligence etc.

After getting over the complete shock, what the heck would I do? I couldn't tell anyone, at least not at first. It's absolutely, completely unbelievable. And is it temporary? Or permanent? Do I go to school (Northfield Comprehensive)?? I can't even remember what time school starts! Either 9am or 9.15am. I remember where to go, though — the registration class. Would my friend at the time, Gary Dix, think I am being a bit weird and strangely intelligent when I start talking? At that age I was starting to talk about all the things I do now -- the Universe, God, life after death etc. But my thoughts have somewhat developed since then!

Do I go to lessons? First thought is obviously not, I nick off and explore this world of 1977! On the other hand, it might be fun to attend school for at least a day and give the teachers a piece of my mind. I could explain to Mr Lonsdale, my physics "O level" teacher, that he is naively pre-supposing our physical theories depict a literal state of affairs, and it is difficult to reconcile this supposition with the underdetermination of theories by evidence i.e for any macroscopic state of affairs a unlimited number of theories can be dreamt up employing wildly differing entities to explain that state of affairs. Yep, see how long the condescension by teachers towards me lasts! (some teachers used to mock my ability).

Then I'll nick off the next day and forevermore after that (assuming this is a permanent state of affairs, and I'll continue to exist in my 15-year-old body). I should be able to use some of my knowledge of the future to make money. But how would I affect the future? There's the Butterfly effect.

Oh yes, and I would go over to Andrea Stark and tell her that I'm not gay! 😂 (I found out a few years ago that she thought I was gay at the time).

The fine-tuning of the Universe

Suppose someone -- let's call him Peter -- were kidnapped, and the kidnapper is a psychopath and sets up some explosion device that is tied to Peter. The device is programmed to shortly generate 10 random numbers from 0 to 9. If the numbers so generated are anything apart from 10 zeros, it will instantaneously explode, and hence kill Peter.

So Peter thinks, well this is it then. The chance of me surviving is 1/10^10 or 1 in 10 billion. Astonishingly though, much to his delight, the contraption duly displays the 10 zeros!

So he says to the psychopath "you had me worried there, you must have programmed it to display 10 zeros!"

The psychopath responds, "no, no, not at all! It was completely random and you're just incredibly lucky. Don't forget, if it had been any other combination of numbers, you would be dead and wouldn't be here to think about it. You can only live in a world, and hence contemplate your situation, where 10 zeros come up.

Of course, this sounds preposterous, and we would surely conclude the psychopath is lying. But does his argument have merit?

This is not just an idle question. It has direct applicability to the fine-tuning of the physical constants of our Universe. Or indeed the fact we were actually born, rather than any of the countless potential human beings that could have been born in our place. Or the fact that the human race came into being due to all the improbable events that were required, e.g. the meteor impact 66 million years ago etc.

A spiffing idea for a novel

I think a spiffing idea for a novel would be if a group of people want back in time to the age of the dinosaurs, say about 80 million years BC. Talk about their survival, building a shelter etc. Then eventually they discover intelligent dinosaurs walking on their hind legs approximately the size of us humans that communicate with speech to each other! The humans eventually end up getting captured, and the dinosaurs don't initially believe that the humans are intelligent. Until they discover that the humans communicate with speech, and they have strange devices on them, and formidable weapons.

I'd write it myself, but I'd be no good at writing novels.

Do animals experience jealousy?

From the following article:

Humans Aren’t The Only Animals To Experience Jealousy — Dogs Do, Too

It says:

Jealousy is a fairly common human emotion — and for a long time, it was presumed it truly was only human. Some have argued that jealousy, with its focus on social threat, requires a concept of “self” and a theory of mind.

Anyone who's had a dog as a pet knows that dogs feel jealousy. We don't need to look at any studies. It's clearly the case that a dog doesn't have to have a concept of self, it just has to know that another animal is receiving affection and it isn't. Apparently, people are "anthropomorphising" in assigning emotions to animals. That's right, we are! If an animal behaves in a very similar manner to a human being who's in a certain emotional state, it is rational to assign that emotional state to the animal too. Any sane person would, but unfortunately many scientists have a propensity to believe the most preposterous stuff imaginable.

Life back in 1300

I have no idea what peoples lives were like centuries ago. Say in 1300 or whenever. Were the common people mostly hungry all the time? Constantly suffering from plague, disease, illness? Was life short, nasty and brutal? How did they entertain themselves? They didn't have the Internet, nor TV, nor books (and they couldn't read anyway). And what would they think of our modern world?

And if I went back in time to 1300, what would they think of me? Would I be able to blend in? Would they think I'm weird?

The fetishizing of work

I read the following article:

The Cult of Busy-ness

The author says:

[Steve Jobs] was a man who lived a life almost completely devoid of any reason to be alive. His renowned ascetic existence was grey and cheerless and boring beyond endurance. And… well… he’s dead. How is this success?

Our culture has a fixation on work. Success and worthiness, one's standing, have been defined by how hard one works and how much money one earns. For many people, work becomes the point of their existence. Without it they would become lost, be forced to look inside themselves and face the inevitable existential angst. We all need goals, and the goal of being a "success" and held in high esteem by others has a certain appeal.

Newton and a smartphone

Imagine if you went back in time to 1770 and showed Isaac Newton a modern smartphone (obviously can't make calls, but the camera, torch, chess programs etc would work). Would he think it was magical, produced by witchcraft or whatever? Or would he understand that the regularities (physical laws) describing reality are much more intricate than he might have supposed. Regularities that can be utilized to produce such a wonderous device?

I think the latter.

Chatting about other people

I've heard it claim that two-thirds of human conversation is gossip about other people. Surely not?? Anyway, I scarcely ever talk about other people. It's just not something that interests me. I'm extremely bad even by male standards.

This is problematic because it's how many people bond. They don't like talking about intellectual stuff, they like talking about whatshecalled been up to. "She did what?? Ooh, well I never!" Well, at least some women talk like that, if not men!

Anyway, more seriously, as I said it helps to bond people together . People like to share their experiences of others, especially negative experiences. They want sympathy, they want to express how they feel about others. I think it's disadvantageous having little interest in such stuff. Oh well, I've always been different.

By 2404

I really have no idea what the future might be like in, say, 400 years time or so. What will the world be like in 2404? What will have happened to the climate? They'll have been mass migration from the hot areas of the world to Europe by then, since these hot areas might be too hot for human beings to exist. People will start living in Antarctica.

What will technology be like? Probably we will have a shared virtual reality pretty much indistinguishable from real life. We'll have robots that maybe look like us and on a superficial level behave and speak like us. But they still don't fool people that they are sentient for any appreciable length of time as there's something off, weird, unconvincing about them.

And will people still subscribe to philosophical materialism? Next 100 years the mainstream view might be some type of materialism, but not by 2404.

If I'd never been born

What would the world be like if I had never been born? Exactly the same as very few people have known me and even those that have never listen or read anything I say? I don't think so. Infinitesimally small changes in the world lead to larger and larger effects without end, leaving nothing untouched until the whole world is changed. I reckon if any one of us had never been born, the world would be different, perhaps very different.